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Why "Owl"?
 
My 9 year old niece asked me recently "Why do you like owls?"  Well .... the answer to that is rather complex.  Let me try to explain.
 
I was born and raised in Corbeil, a small rural community about 20 kilometers east of North Bay, where I currently reside.  Amongst my earliest memories, are the summer nights when I was about to fall asleep with my bedroom window open.  I would hear the usual soothing country chorus of bull frogs, crickets, the odd wolf and an assorted cacophony of sounds that I didn't have names for.
 
But the one sound that would always bring a smile to my face was the hoot of an owl.  I would hear this almost every night.
As I grew older, I started noticing that some animals that I had seen or heard when I was younger were no longer there.  I didn't see any more turtles or hear any more wolves.  But the most missed was my precious owls.  I asked a few people in my life at the time about the change in the wildlife but I was told that they didn't think that there had been any changes.  In my early adult years, I came across some maps released by the Ministry of Natural Resources showing wildlife distribution across Canada over the years.  These maps confirmed my observations that the wildlife patterns had indeed changed in my pre-teen years.
 
I once drove a bus load of kids on a weekend trip to a wildlife preserve.  There was a bird show.  You know the kind that I mean ... There were various birds (a hawk, an eagle, etc.) which put on a show in an arena which was ringed by bleachers.  I was sitting in the back row away from the group.  They brought out an owl, gave the usual canned lecture about the bird then released it.  He flew around the arena twice then landed on the bar directly behind me.  He was less that a foot away from my left shoulder.  The announcer said "Hey!  He must like you.  He's shy and always finds somewhere to land as far away from people as possible."
 
In the last half of the '70's and most of the '80's, I worked the night shift.  So it seemed only natural that my brief stint in CB radios, I used the handle "Midnight Owl".  I reprised the name in the '80's as a SysOp (System Operator) of my own BBS (Bulletin Board System) which I called "The Owl's Nest".  Hence the name of this page.
 
When I registered for Geocaching, that name was in use as well as other combinations using the word "owl".  I finally found the name White_Owl as an acceptable alternative.  I have also used this same handle for other sites such The Degree Confluence Project.