Roof tiles slip in Dourada Alta, three or four a week, and the tilers no longer remark on it. The cause is a Giant Owl, six feet tall on the ridge pole, which lands heavily and shifts from foot to foot like a man on a cold step. It favors the notary's chimney. The notary has had that roof relaid eleven times. Benedita Moura, who keeps goats below the church, has set a second fence post beside the one the owl prefers, as a courtesy, and the bird now uses both on alternate nights.
Locals know it is near by what stops. Hens quit scratching. Dogs lie flat with their chins on the ground. The wings make no sound at all, so the first notice is a shadow crossing a lit shutter, wider than a cart. The hooting, a note like an empty barrel rolled down steps, comes only from the far ridge above Olmedilho, where the bird calls to its mate. Heard close, it has already passed. After dusk nobody says "owl." They say the Lodger, because naming the bird aloud is thought to make it look up. Flocks are penned by dark, and the oldest ewes are tied at the outer rail.
It eats lambs, kids, hares and the occasional goose, swallowing them nearly whole. By morning it has coughed up a pellet the size of a loaf, dense with wool and bone and whatever the prey carried: a buckle, a thimble, a collar ring. A trade in Olmedilho exists only for this. The pellet-breakers walk the ridge early with a mallet and a sieve, split what lies under each roost, and keep half of what they find. One of them once turned up a pair of spectacles, still folded. Roosts are easy to track. White streaks run down the wall below them, and the stones smell like a wet wool coat.
Benedita says the pair on the ridge are the same birds her grandmother fed, which would make them well over seventy years old, and I have no way to check it. What the village gets wrong is the ewes. They believe the Lodger takes the oldest first, a kind of tithe, and tie the old ones out accordingly. It takes whatever stands nearest the fence and cannot turn quickly, and the old ones are simply slow. Benedita knows this and ties them out anyway. "Rosa had a good life," she says. "She'd rather be useful."
- Classification
- Giant nocturnal raptor
- Habitat
- Terraced uplands and tiled hill towns
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 6 ft tall, 14 ft wingspan
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Terraced uplands and ridge villages
- Binomial
- Ululator gravis
- Diet
- Lambs, kids, hares, geese
- Temperament
- Aloof, territorial, stubbornly habitual