It took a second for the anomaly to register. A faint "dingle-dingle-dingle" out there in the desert.

I was standing with a man from California that I'd just met, after months of phone calls, visiting with a local rancher quite literally over the fence. We had been enjoying tales of him herding sheep over 60 miles when he was just seven years old, cigarettes and whiskey then close at hand in his herder wagon. And checked the scar where a bullet had passed through his underarm.

The jingling was my cell phone, fifty meters back across the sage. I quickly hobbled over, the masked heeler following happily. (She had for the past hour been trying to dig cool dirt beds in our shadows, without much luck. Her wiser sister had stayed in the truck.)

The call was dispatch, with a message for me to call the Chief of Police of our small town.

Oookay.

Turns out we have a juvenile owl on the ground, on a side street, in our main park. Chief had been concerned, but they managed to haze the owllet under the park's caboose, and all seems well now.

I promise to check the owl when I get back this afternoon.

My lek tour with the Californian goes longer than I expected, and by the time I get home, I have only a few hours to finish up the annual report database that the boss says he absolutely has to have today.

Which I finish and email by 16:58.

Two minutes to spare.

The owl forgotten.

Until one of the town guys drives by in the evening, as the wife and I are out with the crippled, aging heeler mother. Last he saw, the owllet was roosting up under the caboose, out of danger, with a parent owl watching from a nearby tree.

Okay. No worries.

But this morning, after an hour or so of more office work, I thought I ought to check. It's only a three block walk.

I find the same town guy working in the park. No owllet by our caboose.

All we find is a molted adult owl feather

which he is surprised not even I can legally pick up and keep.

But it is he, who has watched these owls all spring, who spots the youngster, well up in a nearby tree.

Contentedly watching the day go by. The town guy mentions the owls are getting quite civilized. He's finding their refuse, the feet and legs of rabbits they have killed in the park, piled on top of one of the park's trash cans.

I head over to that corner of the park, catty-corner from the young owl, and find both parents settled in a shady niche.

And then it is back to the office work.

After a quick check to confirm the spider hatchlings are still hanging around the spruce trees.