OWL ON THE PROWL

Medium : Gouache on illustration board

Image Size : 8.5” x 8.5”

Circa : 1975

You could hang this picture on your ceiling and call it off-the-wall art! Let's pretend you're a caterpillar crawling along the ground in the dead of night. Glancing upward, you catch a split-second glimpse of one frame from this fast-action sequence: the great horned owl's radar has locked onto a running rodent that's about to become another link in the food chain. You must have seen hundreds of pictures of this event, but did you ever see it from the worm's-eye-view? The night has a thousand eyes—and you can count them all in an aspen grove. Many don't even show in the dark, but a pro in the dark—like a great-horned owl on the prowl with his stomach bigger than his eyes—can pinpoint the goodies below in the dark.”

-Charley Harper

Beguiled by the Wild, 1994