A recent post on Birdchick’s blog about people mistaking a fake owl for the real thing reminded me of the time it happened to me.

I was 8 months pregnant with Clare and sound asleep one night. Suddenly, my husband, who’d been out taking a walk in the neighborhood rushed into the bedroom and woke me up to tell me an owl was perched on a neighbor’s fence.

I got up, got semi-dressed and waddled up the street and down the neighbor’s driveway only to see it was a fake owl.

It took a while to convince Dean, but when he could almost touch it, he believed me.

I was not kind about it — although I should have been. After all — he thought he had something special to show me.

Not much later, we did see a Great Eared Owl in a tree in a yard behind our house. So, it could have been the real thing. But it wasn’t.