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A moonlight night, a spotted owl, and a bag of live mice: magic.

Followed my friend Mike and his 9-year-old son over lichen-colored rock and fallen trees tangled with grapevine. Mike carried a box of white laboratory mice, the protocol being to offer up to four mice, one at a time, to any Mexican spotted owl we happened to see in this narrow canyon in the Gila National Forest of southwestern New Mexico. If that owl were to swoop down, grab the mouse, and eat it on the spot, it probably did not have hungry nestlings nearby. But if the owl were to swoop down, grab the mouse, and take her prey away-and if we were to track the flap of those chestnut-colored wings through ponderosa pine, following that suddenly flying mouse-then we might discover a nest of piteously ugly and relatively rare Mexican spotted owlets ( Strix occidentalis lucida).

It all sounded improbable to me. But Mike is a gifted naturalist, and the U.S. government was paying him to camp out, hoot between dusk and dawn, wait for answering hoots, and confirm the location of any breeding pairs of Mexican spotted owls. One of those pairs frequented this canyon, where Douglas fir grew along the rocky bottom; where the sky had darkened now to a cobalt river above our heads; and where the scale was intimate, nothing grand, the original feng shui.

With a wingspan of about 45 inches, this medium-size owl is one of three subspecies of spotted owl, each preferring to nest in healthy, old-growth forests. Listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1993, the Mexican spotted owl quickly became a scapegoat in the Southwest for an unsustainable logging industry already in decline, much like the Northern spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest. The controversy there inspired bumper stickers: i like spotted owls-fried. Or, save a logger-kill a spotted owl. Under new federal regulations, logging practices changed, and eventually the anti-owl sentiment was replaced by other rural concerns. But the spotted owls are still threatened by climate change in the form of extended drought and increased wildfire, as well as by predation by other owls. In the United States, an estimated 2,000 Mexican spotted owls remain (there are far fewer in Mexico).

"Oh, that's a good sign," Mike said, pointing to a splash of white feces on rock.

"Neat," I said, and then, "Oh!" Right behind him, 20 feet away, dark round eyes in a disk-shaped face were staring down at us, the expression singularly judgmental, the short curved beak a comic afterthought. White and brown breast feathers ruffled in a mottled, mesmerizing pattern, and, mesmerized, I stared back, waiting for the bird to fly away.

Soon-like some incompetent paparazzo-I was fumbling for my camera. "These birds are so fearless," Mike stage-whispered. "I've never worked with a species that cares so little about the human presence." In the next two hours, we would watch the female swoop down and take two of the live white mice that Mike's son had placed on top of a jutting tree branch. The mice seemed puzzled but not alarmed to be out of the box, whiskers moving, sniffing at this brave new world. (Yes, I had some feelings for the mice, which I suppressed.) Directly under the female owl, I watched as she swallowed whole her first offering, the gulp and throat movement both casual and awkward. The male joined us within a half hour and also swooped down for two of the mice.

Giddy with this unexpected gift, I felt as if I'd met my favorite environmental celebrity. It was as though this couple had welcomed us into their living room, hospitable hosts eating our plate of canapés, swiveling their heads, blinking their eyes. Hello, hello?

Then the female flew with her second mouse down the canyon to a creviced cliff face, and suddenly we were scrambling after her, running back the way we had come. Full stop! Panting! We craned our necks and hoped this rocky crevice, 30 feet up, sheltered her nest. Alternately, it might simply be a cache-a storage area for white laboratory mice. Since we couldn't see or hear young birds, Mike suspected the latter.

Meanwhile, the cobalt river above our heads had become a night full of stars. The 9-year-old did a little dance, the beam of his flashlight illuminating the path home.

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