Night noises - part 2 - June 29, 2020

Last night about 9 o'clock, I heard the pterodactyl again.  It sounded close.  I recorded this call on my cell phone, thinking I'd text it to my sister-in-law to see if she could identify the call.  She is a bird-watcher and has bird-watcher friends and family.  I figured surely one of them would surely know what it is (unless it was not coming from a bird).  I was going to post it here, too, so you could hear it, but the system isn't having it, so you'll just have to imagine your own pterodactyl noise.

The thing kept screeching.  It got to the point that it was almost annoying.  Determined to identify this critter, I went inside to get the spotlight.  The Husband followed me out to the porch.  I pressed the spotlight against the screen and moved the beam around the back yard.  As I was scanning the trees, I wondered what the neighbors across the road (an elderly aunt and uncle) would think if they happened to see the beam moving around.  

We had a similar experience, once upon a time.

I had strung a set of dragonfly lights from a low-hanging tree limb in our side yard.  They were tiny little lights - mini-Christmas tree lights - and there were only 10 of them.  I had grouped them close together, imagining a concentrated hazy glow, rather than stretching the string out to its full length.  

Several weeks (or maybe months) later, on a night when it was pouring down rain, the telephone rang.  We were all in the living room, watching TV.  My younger son answered the phone.

"Yes, ma'am."
"No, ma'am."
"Well, hold on a minute, and I'll go look."

He laid the phone down and said, "Aunt B says there's a UFO in our yard."  He bolted out the back door into the rain, and came back in, wet and laughing.

You guessed it; Aunt B had noticed the lights for the first time.  I guess the rain amplified the glow.

Anyway . . . . 

I kept moving the beam around the yard, and after a minute, I spotted something on a low limb at the edge of the yard.  We couldn't tell if it was an animal or a loop in a giant grapevine that grows out there.  I opened the screen door and went a few feet into the yard.  As I got closer with the spotlight, the thing I was spotlighting moved!  It turned its face away from the beam and started side-stepping across the limb.  We could see its big old claws raising and lowering.

It was an owl!    

Mystery solved.