Photo used without permission from Birder’s World Magazine – hope they’re cool with it

It’s dusk in my backyard and I’m meandering around with my dog Oyster. Hotdog, our old-man Maine Coone cat, lounges in the neighbor’s yard, twitching and flipping his tail contentedly. It’s a lovely Spring evening.

Out of nowhere, a smallish, feathery silhouette flutters near my cat’s head and zooms back to the telephone wire hanging above. At first, I think it’s a bat, but realize it’s too big for a bat. It is the bat time of evening, and I look skywards and see a few actual bats careening around the evening sky and realize that whatever is swooping down near Hotdog is too big to be a bat.

It’s a Burrowing Owl (Athene cunicularia), a tiny little raptor that lives in mazes of underground tunnels, usually in open fields. In Southwest Florida they’re very common, though I’d never seen them before.

This little owl is attempting to snatch, and presumably haul away for a tasty snack, my 16 pound male cat, Hotdog. He’s unfazed, and appears to not even notice the terrifying brushes with death he keeps enduring. The owl swoops near him again and again, returning to his perch on the wire, sometimes on the shed, where I get a halfway-decent look at him. They’re very pretty.

Then…. THREE MORE of them show up, all on the wire overhead. By now, my wife’s outside with me, marvelling and laughing at the fact that these tiny little birds are attempting to murder our cat, when all of a sudden, they start divebombing us! Coming within inches of our heads, we duck and cover as they assail us from above. Hands-down this is one of the funniest and most amusing thing I’ve seen in ages. We’re okay, and nobody’s injured. In fact, Hotdog’s back inside now and probably doesn’t even know how close he came to being carried away and pecked to death.