Chicken of the Sea

I'm telling you for the last time! Just because I keep a list of books I read with owls in them doesn't mean I have to tell you every time an owl appears in a single volume. One owl per volume. My obligation begins and ends there! BUT! I came across more owls in THE ODYSSEY and they really gave me something to think about. See, these owls are on Calypso's island and... well, here, I'll let Emily Wilson's translation do the talking: "Birds nested there but hunted out at sea: the owls, the hawks, the gulls with gaping beaks." So, the way I'm reading that, the owls are out there with everybody else, grabbing up a healthy diet of crabs and fish or what-have-you. Now, if you're anything like me (you're not), you're thinking about the time I just couldn't picture owls hanging out on a beach. Such an image was beyond my mental capacity, save for a fancifully scornful "owls on surfboards" motif. Looks like I'm wrong again! OR AM I? I am. Although I often say I don't care about looking things up, or anything else, anymore, and it is 100% true, I did get out of bed and consult my Robert Fagles translation of THE ODYSSEY, which I had sworn I was too tired to ever do again. I guess I have a few tricks left in me after all. Just like wily old Odysseus himself! Anyhoo! Here's Fagles: "birds roosted, folding their long wings, owls and hawks and the spread-beaked ravens of the sea, black skimmers who make their living off the waves." So, if I'm reading that correctly, which I'm certainly not, Fagles has only the "ravens of the sea" (sounds like a worse version of Chicken of the Sea brand tuna, ha ha! What if you ate some canned tuna and said, "Wow, this tastes just like raven"? Oh my goodness, what a world that would be, we're having some fun now), what Emily Wilson more sensibly calls "gulls," eating out of the water, not the owls and hawks. Which of them translated more accurately? Well, I'll never know. I don't know ancient Greek and something tells me I'm not going to start learning it now. But! According to things I glanced at on my phone, there are several kinds of owls known under the umbrella term "fish owls" or "fishing owls," and you'll never guess what they eat! That's right, fish. It's all part of the theme of the "blog," which is that I'm wrong about everything. For example, when I sit around thinking ha ha, owls on the beach, what a gas, that's rich, ho ho ho, what a time to be alive.