Ever since finding those two barn owls that someone had shot in an oak grove in the Santa Monica mountains -- a federal crime, btw -- I think about owls a lot. We hear them here at night, sometimes see them hunting, their flight swift and utterly silent.

So this story today in the NYT (it's been online all week, with lots of cool extras) is fascinating. The barn owls those boys killed? Turns out their species has its own language, the story says.

That's a burrowing owl in these photos, one of a series of out-sized statues in Malibu's Legacy Park. And that's the camera shy Miss Maisie this morning, serving oh-so-reluctantly as a scale conversion calculator.