Good times with cross-cultural communication and owls

On Saturday I went to visit my friend Maria for some Gringa Time as I like to call it. Shortly after I got to her place, which sits behind her landlady’s house in kind of a closed-in compound area, the landlady’s boyfriend and his friend started hacking down a perfectly good avocado tree with machetes. We asked them why they were cutting it down and so, as men of few words, they put it very eloquently: “Because.”

After a few more minutes we discovered it was in order to build a wall. A wall for what?? For a house. Huh??? So thankfully the landlady, explained that it’s a wall that will initially be used to hide the grossness of the backyard for her impending wedding to said boyfriend, or I guess, fiancée. Then they’ll add onto it and make a little covered spot for sitting, which we call a ranchón and I can’t think of a good translation in English. It took most of the morning to figure that out.

The other fun part of this whole tree cutting process was that the tree was also the home to a little family of owls who were thusly made homeless. I don’t think I’d ever seen an owl in person before, they’re funny looking little guys:

This is just after this baby owl freed himself from being stuck under the fallen branches:


And now he’s got his head completely turned around backward:


Yes, they cut the tree down with the cars right next to it, dropping at least one large branch on the white one:


To get the little guy out of harm’s way, the friend picked him up in a saco and found him a new home away from falling objects:


Later, when the action had quieted down a bit, the mother and father owls, who had taken refuge in a tree that the babies could fly up to, took to dive-bombing the guy who was hacking the tree into smaller pieces. Quite the Saturday!