Another Barn Owl – Bird Art Print on Wood

From start to finish in less than 3 minutes

This listing is for a limited edition, fine art print of my original painting of a Barn Owl called, “Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”

This portrait is of a barn owl named Whisper. He lives (I believe) at the World Bird Sanctuary in Missouri. I titled this piece a bit differently than I normally do. Generally I look to song lyrics that accompany the songs I’m listening to while I work. This time around, I turned to Pema Chodron’s The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times for a bit of inspiration.

The full quote:

“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”

Recent events have left me in a bit of an emotional tailspin. I know, I know. Real business people are supposed to avoid mixing politics and business. “Don’t offend the customer, Maggie!”

But here’s the deal. Political affiliation aside, I’m dumbstruck by what I see as a dwindling of compassion. There’s so much vitriol. I can’t help but wonder what might happen if people could put their anger aside for just a moment, just long enough to recognize that the people on the other side of the fence are just people. Just like them. At the end of the day, we all just want to feel safe.

Anyway, I don’t need to continue preaching, but I hope that maybe, at some point, we’ll reach a place where we can use critical thinking and compassion to navigate the complexities of life.

About the Barn Owl

from AllAboutBirds.org:

Barn Owls swallow their prey whole—skin, bones, and all. About twice a day, they cough up pellets instead of passing all that material through their digestive tracts. The pellets make a great record of what the owls have eaten, and scientists study them to learn more about the owls and the ecosystems they live in.

Up to 46 different races of the Barn Owl have been described worldwide. The North American form is the largest, weighing more than twice as much as the smallest race from the Galapagos Islands.

Barn Owl females are somewhat showier than males. She has a more reddish and more heavily spotted chest. The spots may indicate the quality of the female. Heavily spotted females get fewer parasitic flies and may be more resistant to parasites and diseases. The spots may also stimulate the male to help more at the nest. In an experiment where some females’ spots were removed, their mates fed their nestlings less often than for females whose spots were left alone.

The Barn Owl has excellent low-light vision, and can easily find prey at night by sight. But its ability to locate prey by sound alone is the best of any animal that has ever been tested. It can catch mice in complete darkness in the lab, or hidden by vegetation or snow out in the real world.

The oldest known North American Barn Owl lived in Ohio and was at least 15 years, 5 months old.