Each evening birdlover Tom stood in his backyard, hooting like an owl - and one night, an owl called back to him. For a year, the man and his feathered friend hooted back and forth. He even kept a log of the "conversation."

Just as he thought he was on the verge of a breakthrough in interspecies communication, his wife had a chat with her next door neighbor.

"My husband spends his nights ... calling out to owls," she said.

"That's odd," the neighbor replied. "So does my husband."