WOL [Great-Horned Owl]

The grey blob mid-branches is the owl.
When grandson and I went on owl watch in the early evening, owl had moved out of the dense foliage and onto a bare branch. I hurried out, camera swinging from my wrist hoping for a better look at the Mallards who had appeared on the pond, and then spotted the dumpy oval owl-shape in full view. Daughter's cat, Tarbaby, [who has been demonstrating suicidal behaviors] was stalking the ducks, creeping through the long grass on the edge of the pond. From his branch the owl appeared interested in the possiblity of cat as snack.

Easy to see why "owlish" is not usually a complimentary term.

This feather, from the owl's front, was lying on the tangled grass under the owl's perch. It is incredibly soft and downy. I looked for others and for an owl pellet. Grandson found one last year, freshly hoiked up. Such treasures seldom appear when I deliberately look. They are there, waiting to be suddenly noticed before the wind whisks them away or tromping boots crush them.

Dusk and the first chill of evening coming in over the pond. When I looked up again, the owl had gone; silent wings, gleaming nocturnal eyes, deadly beak and grasping talons.

How do they say "OWL" where you live? I defy anyone speaking any regional form of English to get that word out in one syllable! Three letters, yet an unwieldy mouthful to manage. New Englanders torture the word with various nuances: "ah-wul"; "aaawwl" [a sound such as one involuntarily makes when a tongue depressor is being employed.] "ouw-wul." If you bring to mind Eliza Doolittle singing out her vowels for Prof. Higgins, you have a number of options.

Our grandson when he was about three, came up with an alternative that has become a family tradition: "agle." [Think "angle" with the "n" missing!]

I once had an enjoyable reciprocal conversation with a great horned owl. It was early autumn in Vermont, leaves not yet parted from the hardwoods, but a fine temperature for an afternoon walk. We were home from church, lunch eaten. I sought companions but neither husband or our two teenagers were of a mind to stroll through the pasture and across the brook.

Crossing the slender ripple of the Lemon Fair, I stopped to crush a snippet of wild mint and watch the kildeers running over the rough ground, uttering their name-cry. I hopped from one grass-tufted hump of dirt to another--the place we always referred to as "the bog", the spongy ground cut and molded by the feet of my grandfather's cattle, plodding toward the cool shade of the woods and then back to wait at the pasture gate for milking.

To the left, a line fence and rutted wagon tracks leading over a little knoll, down through a wooded hollow and on to the now-collapsed sugar house. I surged through an ever-spreading stand of prickly ash to the circle of shag-bark hickory, stood with planted feet and head craned to evaluate a possible crop of hickory nuts. I recalled nut gathering afternoons with my grandfather, the team of work horses standing patiently hitched to the wagon while we rustled through fallen leaves for pale nuts, some still cupped in greeny-brown hulls. We dropped the nuts into small battered buckets which grandpa emptied into burlap grain sacks.

As I stood there in the green, leaf-strewn circle, a sudden owl-call came from a branch midway up a hickory. "Whoo-whoo whoo-whooo!" "Whoo to you, too!" I said crossly, startled. The owl obligingly replied. Intrigued, I stood there hooting and the owl answered in hollow booming tones. We carried on this way for perhaps half an hour before the owl shrugged and floated off toward the neighbor's farm. I scrambled over a rocky hillside, scraped through more prickly ash in hopeful pursuit, but the encounter was done.

After endless attempts to photograph our resident owl yesterday, I pulled out a copy of Winnie the Pooh and reacquainted myself with the "owl" of E. H. Shepard's illustrations which conjure memorable creatures from the words of A. A. Milne.

At wikipedia I found this bit. It made my day.

"Wol is a Kentish and Sussex dialect word for Owl,[1] which Milne would have been familiar with, living on a farm at Hartfield at the time he was writing Winnie the Pooh."