Owl family webcam inspires artist

Rat or rabbit. The debate at www.us tream.tv/theowlbox is nearly the same every evening at 8:30 after Molly and McGee — barn owl parents in a San Marcos backyard — drop off dinner for four youngsters.

"It's a rat. Look at the tail," one regular online viewer in Texas chatted Friday about a pinhole of blurry activity caught via video camera between the feet and feathers of a wobbly owlet.

"No," asserted another viewer in Virginia. "The rat tail is from last night's dinner. It's a rabbit."

For digital graphics illustrator John Atkinson, Molly-related online chatter is as interesting as the animals themselves.

Atkinson, a Wheatland native who lives in Vacaville, channels his own fascination about the 24-hour-a-day live owl box stream — and the social phenomenon surrounding it — into a comic strip called "Laughing Outside the Box." He sells the full comics series online to diehard Molly watchers for $4.99.

An average of 8,000 Molly fans are signed on to a chat room at the owl box website during any given moment of the week. About 5.5 million Internet address owners have logged in and more than 8 million viewers have visited the site — most, multiple times

— since it went up in February, according to UStream.

"It's a community that's created its own rules and language," Atkinson says of his fellow MODs, otherwise known as those who suffer from Molly obsessive disorder.

"Sometimes, we're watching things that are uproariously funny, and sometimes things that are just heartbreaking."

The "heartbreaking" category includes a long and intense vigil over an egg that never hatched.

"People named it Dudley," Atkinson says. "It's still there, and will probably become a character (in the comic strip)."

Viewers were even more upset when Molly herself failed to return home one night last week. For more than 20 hours, online conversation reflected concern, then worry, then anxiety and even grief over the mother owl's disappearance.

Previously, her trips away from the nest had been brief — a few minutes at most, to relieve herself and to stretch.

When she finally returned, "everybody was relieved," Atkinson says.

Barn owl moms, it turns out, know when their kids' digestive tracts are ready to handle solid rodent. When that time comes, the mom starts hunting for food, just like the father.

"We're all becoming owl experts together," Atkinson says of the learning process he and thousands of others have shared in the past weeks. "It's pretty strange."

Viewers be warned

Then there was the Easter incident.

"On Easter eve, McGee (Molly's mate) brought in a rabbit and it wasn't dead yet," Atkinson recalls. "It was screaming and blood was flying. People were traumatized."

Everybody learned a lesson though.

"Owls do not have Miss Manners-approved eating habits," Atkinson says.

His comic strip that Sunday also featured McGee bringing home a rabbit. But it was made of chocolate.

"People said it was the perfect remedy for what happened and what they went through watching," Atkinson says.

The talons-down funniest episode, he says, involved a domestic squabble between Molly and McGee, "which centered around menu selection."

It began when McGee brought home an enormous rabbit.

"We could all hear him struggle to just get it through the owl door," Atkinson explains.

Molly and her four owlets feasted for several meals, he says, "but round about the third day, Molly decided the thing was starting to get a little funky."

She dragged the half-eaten rabbit to a far corner of the box, Atkinson says, "just to get it out of the way."

But when her mate returned home with more prey — only to find perfectly good rabbit on the refuse pile — he angrily dragged the carcass back to Molly, "as if to say, "Here. Eat your d—ned rabbit."

As the animated conflict unfolded, Atkinson says, viewers chatted about what they believed the owls were saying to one another.

And the denouement occurred, "when McGee dropped that rancid stinky rabbit carcass right on Molly's head," the cartoonist says, laughing. "There were owl daggers flying out of Molly's eyes, like 'you did not just do that.'

"Then McGee backed up, like, 'OK, see ya,' and was out the door. I was crying from laughing so hard," Atkinson says.

Wheatland childhood

Now he squeezes the owl funnies project — which includes free coloring book-type comics for kids to use — between work for a division of George Lucas' film empire, and other visual graphics work for television documentaries.

After winning a couple prestigious awards for film work several years ago, Atkinson visited some Bay Area schools where he'd been asked to present show-and-tell demonstrations.

Though he does not have children, Atkinson, 48, says he found a new passion in relating to kids' creative instincts, and technology savvy.

His own artistic awakenings, he says, hearken back to childhood in Wheatland, where he was forced to sit with his parents through long meetings at the local chapter of the American Legion.

"My folks were too cheap to hire a babysitter," he says. "It was old people standing around talking and banging gavels, and I was like, OK. I'm really bored."

His mom started passing him sheets of stationary from the California Department of Transportation headquarters — now Caltrans — where she worked.

"All my first drawings had the Department of Transportation logo on them," he says. He continued drawing, and then painting, through childhood and beyond. He still keeps a stack of his mom's old stationary on hand.

"When I have a really great idea, I break out the special paper. It's got magical properties," Atkinson says.

Wheatland, he says, helped spark his imagination. "I had friends who had lived in Okinawa and Germany, and that helped build a greater world view than most kids in little towns get," he says. "Thank God for Beale Air Force Base. It kept us from being a complete hick town."

United by owls

With his link back to the simplicity of the animal world, Atkinson feels as if his own life is starting to come full circle.

And he's made an unlikely friend in the process: Carlos Royal, the man behind the owl box.

Royal, 67, a retired San Marcos real estate agent, created his technology-nature classroom quite by accident, he says.

The lifelong nature lover erected an owl nesting box on a 15-foot pole two years ago so he and his wife could witness part of a raptor's life from close by.

"We didn't know anything about barn owls, but we thought it'd be pretty neat to watch 'em come and go," he said by telephone Friday.

When Molly and McGee — so named by the Royals — began nesting, Royal said he decided to replace an old camera that had come with the box with an improved model, so that he could share the owl-watching experience with his 95-year-old mother in Bakersfield.

He made a deal to give his teenage grandson driving lessons in exchange for help in broadcasting the video feed online.

His mom, sister, and several of the couple's friends were able to start watching Molly on Feb. 15, when UStream began to show live streaming video from the box online. But none of them had any idea, Royal says, how quickly or how far Molly's name and online address would come to be known.

One of the early strangers to show up at the UStream site was Atkinson, who'd received the link from a friend in San Marcos, and a message urging him to check it out.

After watching for a few minutes, he thought, "It's really cute, and there's really a lot going on in that box," Atkinson recalls. "The next step was getting to know this community of other watchers."

Within a few days, he had made contact with Royal, who chats frequently with viewers, and holds question-and-answer sessions via Skype for school kids, by request.

Atkinson says he drew his first Molly comics simply to amuse Royal and other MODs.

"They were hilarious," Royal says. "So I called and said, 'well, they probably won't even pay for your time, but let's market these. … So many people are watching, maybe you'll get a syndicated cartoon or something,'" Royal says.

In recent weeks, Royal has installed a second camera outside the owl box. Viewer and chat traffic is so heavy on the UStream owl sites that an overflow room had to be established.

Fans in Phoenix and Dallas have plans to host Molly watcher get-togethers in May and June. Royal and his owl box recently were featured on the "Early Show," the "Today Show" and have been the subject of countless news stories.

In late June, the baby owls — Max, Pattison, Austin and Wesley — are expected to flap their wings and fly away for good.

"We're all gonna be suffering from empty nest syndrome," Atkinson says of the site's regular viewers.

"The withdrawal," says Royal, "is gonna be horrendous."

Royal and his wife plan to take off in their motor home for a long vacation.

Atkinson thinks his comic strip will be cathartic to people who shared the trials and tribulations of owl parenting with Molly and McGee for several months.

"And," he says, "We'll all be waiting to see if Molly and McGee will want to come back next year and do this again."