He knows wild wood beasts live here, but he may not yet be able to link scent with appearance. We constantly hope for the appearance of something wild without benefit of a whiff to validate the expectation. Though we may now own the land in a legal sense, we are nothing more than the most recent in a long line of caretakers. Its prior human owners can be traced back to the earliest days of European settlement, but those records simply fall within the lifetime of a few of the oldest trees. Any aspiring Thoreauvian knows that owls are the ombudsmen for sylvan glades.
Owls have a very human visage.
They look you full in the face without timidity or shyness. They meet your gaze. We felt honored. The woods had spoken. The owl now knows we know she knows.