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This week on Earth Eclectic Radio Hour, host Laura Dedelow presents “Owl Songs,” an episode born from intimate backyard encounter: an Eastern Screech Owl, red morph, has taken up residence in the Fraser Magnolia outside Laura’s window, and from that small wild fact an entire hour of music unfolds.

Zoe Lewis opens the program with the bright, swinging “Screech Owl” from Provincetown, Massachusetts, before the mysterious Anqaa — whose “Eule” is simply German for owl — offers six minutes of deep earth music. Tim Koehn brings “Owl” from Nicosia, Cyprus, in spare folk idiom, and Simon Tall of Norwich contributes an epilogue of Tawny Owl field recording nestled inside his wryly titled album Birds Aren’t Real. London’s Everyday Magic offers a gentle “Tawny Owl” aimed at younger ears, before Montreal’s The Night Owls arrive with their own self-titled indie rock declaration. Tampa’s Synthetic Dream Foundation take the mythology deeper with “Cerce’s Armoured Owls” — invoking the enchantress Circe, herself long associated with nocturnal creatures and transformation — before a brief archival interlude brings us the voice of Woodsy Owl himself, the US Forest Service’s beloved conservation mascot, reminding us across the decades to give a hoot.

Then the program opens into something magnificent: Ambrose Akinmusire, Bill Frisell, and Herlin Riley with “Owl Song 2,” a jazz meditation from Berkeley that demonstrates what three masters of their instruments can make of a single nocturnal image. Barcelona’s Melisa Bertossi follows with “Harry on the Storm” — a jazz piece whose title nods, with characteristic warmth, to a certain famous fictional owl — before Chicago’s Plastiq Musiq Workshop delivers the actual recorded voice of the Western Screech Owl from their Birds of North America collection. New Orleans’ own Schatzy Band brings “Night Owls” in a folk rock register, and Alan D. Peschke offers one glorious field-recorded minute of three or four different owls occasionally singing all at once, which is either chaos or polyphony depending on your temperament. Los Angeles’ ANDEMIC deliver an indie rock “Owls,” followed by eleven seconds of Florida swamp darkness from Untouched Sounds — eleven seconds that somehow earn their place completely — before Portland’s Ants Ants Ants offer their campfire meditation “Wise Old Owl” and Denver’s Of the Trees bring an electronic “Owl Song.” The final word belongs to Vinnie D. of Charlotte, North Carolina, whose “Wildfire” sends the hour out on an acoustic note, a reminder that the owl’s forest home is never far from flame.

Photo: Eastern Screech Owl, Adult, Red Morph, by Laura Chamberlain Dedelow.