Yesterday afternoon, I was minding my own business, flushing hydrants and turning valves near some abandoned hangars inside the flight line. It’s a little corner where no planes go at all, so they don’t maintain the surface and weeds have popped up in every single crack in the asphalt or concrete.

I like these old hangars. I was just showing Junior the biggest one on Friday. I’ve posted pictures before; it’s five stories to the inside ceiling, so tall that it used to get its own little weather systems inside on a humid day. There’s a surprising amount of wildlife in these abandoned bits of urbanity. I’ve seen red and grey foxes, and endangered Kit Foxes elsewhere. I’ve climbed to the roof of the big one, only to find that coyotes had been there before me, presumably chasing the ubiquitous pigeons, rats with wings. A Red-Tailed Hawk lives in the big one as well as a couple of owls, and I regularly startle owls or find pellets in the slightly smaller ones too.

Someone had been in the big open hangar I was working my way around just a little while earlier, showing it to a potential client and making pathetic jokes about me washing the floor out while I was at it. Sorry; the only building washing I do involves a fire hose, and you don’t get to pick and choose where I shoot it. I suggested he roll his windows up or move on, as I was about to demonstrate. He thought I was joking but moved anyway. Good thing; I wasn’t.

Around the other corner of the building next, I was working valves for about ten minutes when my back insisted on a break. I ratcheted myself back upright and relaxed a little and started to look around at my surroundings, instead of straight down like usual. And I saw an oddly-vertical bundle of feathers blown up against a wall of weeds.

Dead things aren’t at all uncommon around here, and I always like to look at them to see what we have. It’s usually birds, but I’ve found some outstanding foxes and some cats, and have a nice collection of skulls from my finds. I casually walked to within about ten feet of the carcass when its head swivelled and it glared at me with big yellow eyes. At that point, it suddenly resolved itself into a baby barn owl, not fully fledged. He wasn’t angry enough with me to clack his beak, but he wasn’t happy.

I was afraid that the guys in the hangar had scared him out into the open before he was ready. They nest in there, and I didn’t know if he was ready to fly or not. His head was still awfully fuzzy, amongst the flight feathers. I quietly walked a little closer, and he took off for a low glide, which reassured me. Unfortunately, he flew away from his cover, and sitting out in the middle of the asphalt, he looked like an awfully juicy target for some wandering predator. The mockingbirds thought so too, and divebombed him. I started to circle around to gently haze him back to the hangar, but he wasn’t having any of it. His next flight was stronger though, and left him in some weedy concealment, so I stopped worrying about him and went back to my work. He’ll be fine.

I sure regretted not packing my camera with me that day though. I need to get back into the habit of keeping it with me; work stories are so much better illustrated.