Kate Bowers
Fiction
Snowy Owls Delight Birders on Chicago’s Lakefront was named a finalist for the 2026 Clarissa Dalloway Prize for Short Prose, judged by Lucy Ives.
For Abigail
He loved her and married her there in Positano above the sea. The only thing she had packed was her gauzy white dress, which she almost forgot on the plane rushing down the aisle to meet him on the runway after she landed.
And when they left their Brooklyn loft several years later for another city in the States, they left it all—every fork and pan, the leather couch, half their clothing, taking only the dog, really, and what could fit in their carry-on luggage.
Did I mention neither of them were Italian? That she was extraordinarily beautiful and had been wooed properly across New England over two fall seasons, not unlike those old Gilmore Girl stories we had grown up watching so assiduously? That he was from money and tech savvy?
For several years, they were together. She gave up performing for reporting and strangely went back to graduate school in the middle of everything —the game nights, the new dog, the whimsical jaunts to cities in South America since they presently lived so closely to it.
We grew used to their peripatetic life. After all, they lived along the horizon now, and as we aged, we lost patience with squinting.
Still, his birthday reminders came up regularly on the calendar, this last one arriving with baby news. However, the photo wasn’t of her. She had the same long, luscious hair, but this was a new girl, a new city. He had married this one on a mountaintop above the desert in a town where they purchased new forks.
And we didn’t know what had happened to Maria.
A couple of years later, I saw Maria’s work online. She was a full-time reporter now in Chicago with news about the rare sighting of two Snowy Owls—mates who had flown south from their native Arctic Tundra and were resting on the Montrose Pier along Lake Michigan’s shoreline.
“These birds have an interruptive pattern of migration; sometimes we see them, sometimes we don’t,” she reported and then explained this particular species of bird prefers open spaces like the Chicago shoreline over treed areas and that they nest along the ground in bowl shapes they carve into the earth over a few days’ time.
She went on to note the owls feed four rodents a day to their chicks, known as owlets, their preferred food is the lemming, and the size of the available lemming population dictated the number of eggs the birds would lay each year. Possibly, this was a slow lemming year in the Arctic, and the birds were seeking a better food supply flying so close to this heavily populated area along the lake.
Her footage included a clip of a male owl swooping down upon a lemming having a meal of grass and twigs on the tundra and lifting it up into the sky dangling almost tenderly from the bird’s talons, like a small and well-loved teddy bear dragging from the hand of a toddler.
Presumably, the owl had broken the back of the lemming at once when he grabbed it, and the rodent felt nothing as it was pecked apart still inexpertly by the owlets in the nest.
This happened more than once in the clip without any coyness. The lemmings never seemed to try to escape, just followed one after the other through the air to be eaten.
A local birder named John who had been keeping vigil on shore over four days came on screen next, talking about the rarity of seeing two Snowy Owls so close to his home. “I’ve been waiting for this for twelve years,” he said, “It’s one of the greatest lifers ever.” (As he spoke, a lower third ran across the bottom of the screen informing the viewer the term “lifer” is birder talk for a first, in-person sighting of a species.). This was a first sighting for him. You never forget your first.
It was December 22 when I saw the segment, three days before Christmas. None of us were ready. The birds were white beautiful and were the talk of the cocktail parties now, a pleasant switch from holiday tropes and the ridiculous obsession among our circle with that novel Playworld that had been so popular last year, though none of our friends seemed to have actually read it, certainly not I.
Kate Bowers (she/her) is a Pittsburgh-based writer published in Sheila-Na-Gig, Rue Scribe, The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, So It Goes!, and the anthologies “Pandemic Evolution: Poets Respond to the Art of Matthew Wolfe” Hayley Haugen (Editor) and “The Gulf Tower Forecasts Rain” Doralee Brooks, Editor. Kate is an alumna of Tupelo Press’s 30/30 Project, a 2024 Pushcart nominee, and a finalist for the 2026 Clarissa Dalloway Prize. Kate serves is a volunteer social media team member for The Ekphrastic Review. Her forthcoming publications can be found in the anthologies “The Metaphor Tree: an ekphrastic poetry anthology” Lorette C. Luzajic (Editor), “Blood Dance: an anthology of dark ekphrastic flash” Lorette C. Luzajic (Editor), and “Where the Rivers Meet: Pittsburgh Poems” Doralee Brooks (Editor).
Photo Credit: Carrie Cantalupo loves the quirky and unusual and is known to come to a screeching halt when she sees something that tickles her pink, turquoise, red….you name it. She lives in Northern Michigan in the Bohemian Wood and am surrounded by nature. She is known for incorporating both quirk and nature in her art work.
