THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, October 31, 1995 TAG: 9510310412
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
All around town people are saying what a wonderful Indian summer we are having. It's wonderful all right. Many call autumn in Virginia their favorite season, when nature seems to be in a golden swoon; but it isn't Indian summer.
Indian summer doesn't arrive until after a siege of cold weather, usually in late November. In Colonial Virginia, the term had a sinister connotation.
For it was then, when the weather turned warm in the depths of winter, that the Indians timed their surprise attack on the settlers.
You can imagine how it was. The English, newly arrived, had been shivering and sniveling in their daub-and-wattle huts, huddled in the stockade by the James River.
On a sudden benign morning when the day wore a smile, some of them opened the fort's gate and strolled out to bask in the sun, maybe do some fishing or wade out to pick up oysters. Life wasn't so hard to take after all.
Just as the colonists were relaxed and lazy, the Indians came howling out of the brush. You can understand their not wanting to go on a war party, half-clothed, in the freezing cold.
Now the leaves haven't begun to turn, but when they do, you may surmise that the trees, decked in red, orange and bold gold, are Indian tribes on the warpath to surprise.
At daybreak the other morning there was an all-out attack in the tall-masted pine tree out back.
Two dozen raucous crows launched an assault on a great horned owl perched near the top in the thickest foliage.
As few as three crows can sound like a crowd, but the hubbub in the pine was a boiling mob. Soon, strident blue jays came flying to add their siren voices to the fray.
The owl, our largest bird of prey, just sat while the others swirled around him, darting at him, but not so close that they came within range of his talons and beak.
At night he is a flying tiger, sounding between pauses four sepulcher notes that put fear in birds and small mammals. In the morning a patch of gray feathers marks where the owl dined.
Bob Ake, who knows more about birds than do the birds, listens to a female owl in Virginia Beach that has a call of five or six notes, slightly deeper than that of a male. Sometimes, he said, the female's spooky refrain will end in a kind of catch - or even a stuttering - on the last note.
``I keep listening for a second owl,'' he said Monday, ``hoping she will find a mate.''
That they survive amid a metropolis of a million people is amazing, especially the one that moves around an area between the suburbs of heavily traveled Hampton Boulevard and Granby Street.
At night, abed, hearing his call, I smile. ILLUSTRATION: The raucous gang of birds dared not challenge the owl's talons
and beak.
by CNB