On the Wall of Birds, I chose a bird around which I have strong childhood memory. We lived on a dilapidated truck farm with a big barn no longer in use, which fascinated my little brother and me.  We would peek through cracks in its great doors, as it had all the sacred mystery about it a cathedral might.  There was the smell of old hay, and we would hear a great hiss!  We longed to go inside, but our mother forbade it.  That hiss ensured our obedience, despite our longing to explore.  We could sense the bird had flown up to the barn’s rafters, but we could not get a good look at it.  Our mother told us it was a barn owl and might hurt us.  The Wall of Birds gives a beautiful description of the Barn Owl.   The three birds I have seen around here, which I looked up in my 1980 Peterson Field Guide: Eastern Birds, were our beautiful Oklahoma state bird, the Scissortail Flycatcher in the Tyrant Flycatchers (Tyrannidae) family, whom I have seen on utility wires while out on my walks, especially near the university’s law school and natural history museum; the Canada Goose in the Swans/Geese/Ducks family (Anatidae), whom I have seen in great gaggles flying and honking overhead, feeding together in the recreational field across from our house, crossing a busy street slowly on foot as if they had all day, and flocking on the shores of the campus Duck Pond; and the Wild Turkey in the Turkeys (Meleagrididae) family, whom I remember most fondly as gentle guardians of the St John’s Churchyard in Salem, NJ, where my parents are buried, but whom my ex-husband used to hunt using a contraption that made the sound of a wild turkey’s call.   I enjoyed the contraption, but the killing was not for me!  I love the Thanksgiving film on PBS about an orphaned baby Wild Turkey whom a man raised to adulthood.   My favorite bird right now is a flicker who eats at our suet feeder in the afternoon and climbs one of our mulberry trees, chasing another flicker, whom another flicker is also chasing!  The Common Flicker in the Woodpecker (Picidae) Family.  Not sure if it’s red-shafted or yellow-shafted.   I enjoyed the first lesson.  Thank you!