Miniature Adventure On the Beaten Path

The beautiful Banana Slug along the trail in San Bruno, Ca. Photo by author, November 6, 2025.

Thus far on my walk today I came across a banana slug (pictured) and a Townsend’s warbler I could hear very clearly but couldn’t see, singing whole-heartedly from the mountainside.

Very late last night I was a guest at the recital of another fabulous creature—a great horned owl, maybe two, from somewhere very near in the trees close my home.

To hear the great horned owl sing required getting out of bed near midnight in the cold and dark. There on the back porch, I activated my Merlin app so I could track the owl’s music. It was a superior listening experience, a kind of adventure out into the backcountry of the urban wilderness right around me. The great horned owl sang intermittently, throaty, singing as if it was both thinking about singing and/or only singing when it really felt like it.

And what a song! Throaty, mournful breathings into the microphone, sorrowful moans too here and there like the great horned owl meant at any moment to climb up to the moon and bring real moonlight back to earth, or something like it, from a rescue mission it made, a kind of special gift being presented to those who live in the real world.

Shortly after the midnight concert I went back to bed and fell asleep.

When I woke in the early morning I had a message on my phone that a WAYMO robotaxi had run-over a cat right in front of the Roxie Theatre on 16th St. and Albion. The cat, named KitKat, a high-ranking much beloved member of the community, had been struck by a driverless car and was dead.