It’s early. The view out my porch screen is pitch black. It is not, however, quiet.

The owls are at war. Or, at least, it sounds like they have a lot to say this morning. It’s not unusual to hear an owl in the woods around my house. I’ve been listening to them for the last 25 years. It’s not out of the ordinary to hear two owls going at it, hooting back and forth like volleyball.

This morning, I swear, there must be five of them going back and forth at each other.

“Whoo do you think you are?”

“Look whoo woke up in a fowl mood!”

“I don’t know whoo gave you the right to shout at me.”

“Say that one more time and I’ll show you whoo I am.”

“Shut up! I don’t care whoo you are.”

I don’t actually speak “owl.” But this is what it sounds like to me.

I suppose their conversations could be tame. Maybe they’re being all calm and domestic. Their grovels and hoots don’t have to be taken as rude and caustic.

“Good morning. I was wondering whoom else might still be up after last night’s hunt.”

“I am. Do you know whoo left a mouse carcass at my house last night?”

“I don’t have a clue whoo would do that.”

“It was probably Jake. Whoo else would leave a half-eaten mouse lying around?”

I am no owl expert. You can probably tell that I’m just an amateur. But I do have the internet and there are hundreds of helpful owl experts whoo offer videos to assist backwards owl-buffoons like me.

Based on my research, I have the pleasure of living among a community of Barred Owls. According to the expert, whoo seems to know a lot about owls, this particular species of owl prefers a dense forest habitat.

Lucky me. The hundred acres or so that surrounds my house hasn’t been harvested in over 50 years, and the buffer along Palmetto Creek longer than that. There are some Tulip Poplar down in the sandy bottom soils near the creek that two full grown men can’t reach around and join hands.

I can testify as one whoo has lived by this creek for awhile, the owls love it here.

Occasionally, I hear a Great Horned Owl. Now that I’ve listened to several recordings of owl calls, I am fast becoming familiar with whoo is whoom in owl land. His is the gentle call. He sits tall and his pointy little ears actually look like tiny horns on top of his head.

This is the owl from whoom we get the owl call that we teach little children.

“What does the cow say? Mooooo.”

“What does the dog say? Ruff, ruff.”

“What does the owl say? Hoo-Hoo . . . Hoo-Hoo.”

I’m going to suggest that the Barred Owls are way more interesting than the Great Horned Owls. For one thing, the calls are totally different.

My internet guy says that he uses mnemonics for remembering owl calls.

I had to look up mnemonics. It’s like when I was taking piano and Miss Dickerson told me, “All Cows Eat Grass.” That might not have been it, but it’s close. The letters ACEG, or some such order of letters, were supposed to stand for the notes on either the treble clef or bass clef. And they were either the notes on the lines or between the lines. I can’t remember.

A lot of good mnemonics did me.

The owl expert says that the Great Horned owl is just the classic and somewhat gentle, Hoo-Hoo. Everyone recognizes that.

The Barred Owl? His sound is different. I’ve heard it, and even I can tell “this ain’t no Great Horned owl.”

According to the mnemonics guy, the Barred owl sounds a little like, “Who cooks for you?” This alone holds some interest for me since I find it appealing when someone cooks for me at my house.

But to get the feel for the Barred Owl, you have to let your mind run free a little bit. This whoo-cooks-for-you is not being asked by your first-grade teacher, Miss Betty. That would be too polite. Too polished and refined.

When the Barred Owl leans back and takes in a deep breath, the call that comes out of his throat sounds more like the war cry of the Mongolian Warlords. It’s deep. It’s guttural. It trills off at the end with a vocal growl that would make a 12-year-old boy curl up tight in his sleeping bag down by the lake.

Trust me.

The more I listen to them this morning the more I’m convinced that they are not asking anything like whoo-cooks-for-you. It’s way more intense. What I hear is more like, “whoo dares to enter my realm for I shall swoop down from my perch and rip out your guts with my talons and pick apart your brain with my beak.”

And that’s just with one breath.

You get five of them going, and you’ve got yourself a soundtrack from a Stephen King novel. The man goes into the woods at night to look for his dog and never comes home. No one ever hears from him again.

One of the five is close to the porch. I can’t see out, but I bet he can see in. The lamp is on next to me. Of course, he doesn’t need the light. He’s an owl.

His eyes are like huge satellite dishes with double reflective thingies behind the retina to gather even more light than is possible for the human eye. One expert says, an owl can see a mouse as far away as 600 feet in light conditions equivalent to that produced by a single match a mile away.

Yeah. He can see me sitting on my porch.

His eyes are fixed inside his eye-sockets. Unlike us humans, he can’t move his eyeballs. And they’re not really balls, they’re more like tubes. And it’s like they’re glued in place.

This is why Mr. Owl has 43 gazillion more vertebra in his neck than you and me. He can turn his head in circles around us. He can look up and down in places we can’t. With a head on a swivel, his eyes don’t need to move.

I read this and I couldn’t help myself. I’m sitting here trying to move my head around without moving my eyes. My finest owl impression is pathetic at best. I can’t look back over my shoulder to get out of the parking space at Publix. No way I’m gonna be like an owl.

The Cherokee Indians revered the owl. They thought of him as wise, able to “see” things we cannot see. They thought of him as having answers to the past and future, able to see beyond this present world. If an owl showed up, it was because he was bringing a message from the great beyond.

I’ve got five of them howling at me. The hoots are so constant and loud, they sound like wild apes.

Any messages? Yup!

“If you think we’re annoying, just wait till that woodpecker wakes up.”

I love my woods.