Congratulations to the Seagulls, who won passage to Super Bowl XXXXXIV.5 yesterday at Qwest Field.

However the mighty ‘Gulls weren’t the only newsworthy birds of the weekend. On Sunday morning, I received this report from Hot Tipper Greg:

Leaving my apartment to run some Saturday afternoon errands, I noticed a couple of bicycle cops on the sidewalk. As I approached 12th, I saw a crowd of people gathered, all of them looking up at the sky. Then I saw what they were looking at: a white snowy owl perched atop a street light. I rode my bike back up to my apartment and got my camera, then returned to the corner, where I took a few pictures and stared at the owl for about twenty minutes with the rest of the mesmerized crowd. There were about twenty or thirty people there when I arrived; some people meandered off after watching for a little while; others called friends on their cell phones to describe what they were looking at; some people pulled over in their cars, curious to know what everyone was looking at, and the three bicycle cops sat across the street to take in the sight as well. Several crows tried to get the owl to fly away by dive bombing it, but the owl seemed indifferent to them and like it knew the crows were beneath it in both station and style. Three hours later, after I’d run my Saturday errands, the owl and small crowd were still gathered, though it was now perched on the peak of the building that houses the Artist Trust offices. Everyone seemed mesmerized and excited by the owl sighting. I took it as a good omen.

Not all of the weekend’s subsidiary bird sightings engendered such feel-goodism. On Saturday, my roommate went out to get the mail and came back with a big dead bird she found on the sidewalk in front of our place. At first she thought it was a Peregrin falcon, but when the summoned “raptor expert” arrived (referred by the Audobon Society), he confirmed the bird was a Cooper’s hawk. Either way, it was dead, of what looked like natural causes to the raptor expert, and even its corpse was kinda pretty.

Go Seagulls!