So it's about 1 am on a cold winter's night and I'm sitting in my Jacuzzi on the roof of my Washington D.C. house. In a split second, all my hair stands on end and I can't decide whether to run or drown. Two crows have just burst from a massive, ivy-covered locust tree, screaming at the top of their lungs. Then overhead, a giant whitish thing...about the size of a laundry basket it seems at first startle...lands on the end of this long branch and balances overhead, bobbing up and down. The steam rising from the hot water into the cold air adds to my confusion. I slide down into the water and gather myself. When the steam clears and the branch stops bobbing, my heart restarts. It is only a barred owl.
  With the lights of Georgetown and the Washington monument twinkling in the distance, I feel like I'm in the forest primeval. Well, close. My house does back up to Glover Park, one of the many large federal woodlands that twine through the city. I hold still. The owl bobs its head left, right, up and down, each time its focus comes to rest on me. Here we are, just  two round-pupiled, eyes-forward-facing predators sitting alone in the dark, staring at each other. I think maybe I should go get my husband to see this. But he's dead asleep.
  Now let me stop right here and explain about husbands and owls.  I'm here in Washington because of this man I married.  He works at the Smithsonian.  We are bird and critter watchers.  In  fact, we probably dated and married because we learned, at our first meeting in New York City, that we had both grown up in the Midwest, running through fields and swamps.  We were, and are, wetlands fans.  Our soals bonded on one of our first dates when, in the reeds at Jamaica Bay, Queens, we had to disrobe to pick ticks off each other.  Before we were married, he promised that one day he would show me a short-eared owl.
     I was four years old in rural Illinois when I began watching wildlife.  The first creature on my life list is:  Yellow-headed blackbird, Eola, Illinois, 1954.  Over the next 48 years I've learned a lot about wild eyes that watch me back.
  When we look at animals, we like them to look back at us.  That's why we make goofy noises at the zoo and tap on an aquarium's glass.
  We humans are innately cued to study eyes.  When we study each other's eyes, we instinctively know that dilated pupils can mean the person you're looking at really likes you. Or it can mean you're standing in the dark. Beady little eyes equal distaste or destain. Or the sun is behind you. Consider how a pretty girl might be described as doe-eyed, like the big liquid eyes of a deer. But if someone gives you the "evil eye," we automatically think of those eyes as little
  Humans are wired to adore and protect any face with what the Germans call kinderschema..the flat faces, snub noses and big eyes of a human infant. A baby's eyes take up about a third of its entire face. In adults, eyes take up about a fifth. In fact, we're born with nearly adult-sized eyes. Our faces grow up around them. Kinderschema is the appeal of that puppy in the window or the kitten your kid brings home. Big eyes reach out. At an animal shelter a light-coated animal, peering out with big dark eyes, will usually find a home before a dark-coated animal, whose eyes, like those of black bears, sort of disappear into the body.
  My fascination with animal eyes goes back to February nights in the 1950's, when I, the older daughter of a father with no sons, would stand in the barn and help mid-wife piglets into the world. I rubbed them down, got the stuff out of their mouths. But it was when the eyes opened that the piglets were, to my eyes, really there.
  Two kinds of eyes rule in the animal kingdom: directional eyes, which only sense  light and belong to worms and other bitty creatures, and image-forming eyes, found in certain mollusks, bivalves, most arthropods, and nearly all vertebrates.  The giant squid, a cephalopod, has image-forming  peepers bigger than basketballs.  How eyeballs sit in an animal's head is also important.  The Philippine tarsier, a nocturnal monkey, has eyes so big they don't move at all in their sockets.  Like the owl above my Jacuzzi, whose neck can swivel an amazing 270 degrees, the tarsier turns its whole head to look around.  At the other end,  a chameleon, with eyes on stalks, can hold its head still and swivel those peepers around, individually, everywhich way.
  The whole business of color vision is murky and controversial.  The human retina has 125 million thin, straight rods that see in black and white, and 7 million fat little cones that examine colors in bright light.  Primates have pretty good color vision.  Dogs and cats so-so.  Bees can see a color past violet that we cannot see, but they can't tell red from green.  What color vision means to animals is tricky science, because while we can examine the comparative anatomy of eyes, it's much more complicated to determine how an individual species' central nervous system and brain interpret what the eyes see.  Suffice it to say that Homo sapiens are the only creatures that find it necessary to stand around the paint sample section of Home Depot for two hours on a Saturday morning.
  I'd give the award for the most versatile eyes to the oak toad, which, as it swallows, moves it eyeballs back into the roof of its mouth to help push food down its throat.  The most useful adaptation goes to the burrowing  mole skink, which has a little picture window in its eyelid so it can look around without opening its eyes when its head, and swims around pretty much like any other fish until its right eye migrates around to it left side, and the face becomes greatly compressed so it always looks up.  Eye migration is one of the things I plan to ask God about when I meet him.  Anyway, flounder are a hoot to see when snorkeling because their eyes can move independently of each other.
  The shark protects its eyes during attack by rolling them back in its head.  The horned toad, when threatened, can squirt blood from its eye into an enemy's face.
  The worst eyesight for a large animal probably belongs to the rhinoceros.  From 15 feet it can't tell a man from a tree, and will charge big rocks.  Of course compared to the possum that lives under my front porch, the rhino could probably  read  the New York Times.

  Animals eyes are totally cool because nature has adapted each species to have the vision it needs.  Birds of prey see far and clear.  They can make out a rabbit at a mile.  They see in color and have found times our own visual acuity.  Their vision is sort of like high-definition TV.  Until you see it you can't describe it.  My Jacuzzi owl has big round pupils chocked full of rods that gather 10 times more light than mine.  But he has almost no color cones, so he's seeing me in black and white.
  White-tailed deer have amber eyes positioned to see both ahead and to the sides.  And they have horizontal, elliptical pupils, a little grace touch from nature, that being prey, let them see far back over their flanks.
  For some eyeballs, location is everything.  Frogs and alligators have eyes on the tops of their heads, so they can hunker down under the water and hunt periscope-like.  Alligators have three eyelids, including a translucent membrane that lets them see underwater.  Their pupils are vertical, oval, and they have a tapetum luteum that doesn't really glow in the dark, but reflects light back like scary amber saucers.
  Lizards can focus their eyes by sort of squeezing and stretching their lenses.  Snakes, like humans, have yellow filters in their eyes to protect them from ultraviolet light.  Snakes have varies color perception and visual acuity.  Pit Vipers, such as the Timber Rattler, have a kind of infrared vision, developed in the trigeminal nerve, where heat sensors in  the pits just below the eyes can locate prey even in, say, a cave at night.
  As long as we're mentioning crawlies, spiders are special because they usually have eight eyes.  Number and placement of the eyes is important in identification, case in point being "The Six-Eyes Spider."  Hunting spiders mainly rely on vision if they're daytime hunters.  Night Stalkers rely more on a tactile sensory system.
  Of course back up in my hot tub it is not a spider that sat down beside her.  The Barred Owl that has come to  rest on  the branch beside my  roof us just having the best time staring at me.
     Now I'm not afraid of many animals, but I've got to tell you, having an owl stare at me, cocking its head all sorts of ways, was making me feel a little bit like Tippi Hedren in The Birds  I began speaking softly - "You see I'm this great big person ...." so that he did not confuse me as prey in the mist.  For a second I could see myself in one of those funny little 30 second trailers on the six o'clock news.
  Finally, I slipped out of the water, ran into the bedroom, and  awoke my husband from a coma.  "Hurry up.  Get your robe.  Come out here.  There's a barred owl sitting  right over the Jacuzzi..."  He was still mostly asleep in the cold night air when I pointed to, ah, the empty branch where the owl had been.  He was thrilled.
  Not long after that, we celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary.  And he has never shown me a short- eared owl.

Penny Moser