Great gray owls are magnificent birds

A great gray owl scrutinizes a visitor to a Minnesota bog

Columbus Dispatch

January 29, 2017

NATURE

Jim McCormac

Milton B. Trautman was the undisputed dean of Ohio birds. Trautman, who died in 1991 at the age of 91, hailed from the shotgun era of ornithology. In his early days, a significant bird record hardly counted if it wasn't collected.

Imagine, then, Trautman's surprise on Oct. 30, 1947. He was boating to his home on South Bass Island in Lake Erie when he spotted a huge bird perched in a scrubby tree on tiny Starve Island. Drawing nearer, Trautman realized it was a great gray owl - dimensionally, the largest North American owl.

Trautman must have been bouncing off the gunwales, especially when he realized the rocky surf made getting in range to shoot the bird impossible.

Although he didn't make a museum specimen of the bird, he carefully described one of Ohio's few records of this northern owl.

A great gray owl is a mind-numbing bird. It measures over 2 feet in length, with a wingspan stretching nearly 4 1/2 feet. Despite its massive size, the owl weighs less than 2 1/2 pounds - nearly a pound lighter than the much more familiar great horned owl. Dense insulating feathers, which keep the great gray owl warm on frosty boreal nights, make up much of its mass.

I recently made a foray into northern Minnesota bog country, where great grays routinely can be found. At times, I wished I had this species' feathers - the temperatures were well below zero every day, and they sank to minus 29 one frigid morning.

Great gray owls do much of their hunting at dawn and dusk, and cruising appropriate habitat can yield sightings. One magical evening, we came across a knot of birders who had found an owl perched in a nearby snag. The bird was intent on hunting, its head on a swivel as it listened for rodents.

Owls have long fascinated people, and it's no wonder when one looks into the visage of a great gray owl. Piercing yellow eyes are fixed in a large humanlike facial disk, and when the bird deigns to bayonet you with those eyes, the effect is startling. I would not wish to be the luckless vole on the receiving end of that stare.

As the north woods are typically blanketed with thick snow cover in winter, the owls do much of their hunting by ear. Voles and other small rodents mostly remain in tunnel-like runways under the snow - seemingly out of sight and out of mind.

There's no escaping the owls, though. A hunting great gray constantly scans the snow surface, using its incredible hearing to locate rodents under the snow. Offset ears allow it to triangulate on sounds, pinpointing the victim from amazing distances.

When a vole is located, the owl silently swoops to the spot, dives through the snow blanket, and seizes the hapless animal sight unseen.

Although it has been 70 years since Trautman's Ohio sighting of a great gray owl, it's possible that another could appear here. Somewhere along Lake Erie would be most likely. Whoever finds it would be in owl heaven.

Naturalist Jim McCormac writes a column for The Dispatch on the first, third and fifth Sundays of the month. Find out more about the birds he saw in Minnesota bog country at www.jimmccormac.blogspot.com.

Great Gray Owl!

Well, my blogging has certainly fallen behind! I was hoping for more time for this sort of thing, but travels and other stuff have made for less of it.

Anyway, just returned from a trip to the bog lands of northern Minnesota, and saw and photographed many interesting birds. Just time for this one photo now, but I'll try and put up some others soon.

A Great Gray Owl bayonets the photographer with its laser beam stare. Of all the birds that frequent wintertime Sax-Zim Bog, this spectacular owl draws by far the most attention.

It was nearly dark when I made this image. Dusk is an excellent time to find these massive owls, as that's when they typically emerge to hunt. The photo demonstrates the vast improvements in camera technology in recent years. It was shot with the amazing new Canon 5D VI, at an ISO of 12,800! Even so, and with minimal noise reduction applied in post-processing, the image still holds up fairly well. Such a high ISO was needed to harvest enough light to make the image, even with the lens (800mm) wide open at f/5.6 and using a fairly slow shutter speed of 1/320 (could have gone slower and should have), and exposure compensation at +1.7. To help produce a sharp shot, I utilized live view to eliminate shutter slap, and careful camera-holding technique (tripod-mounted). Should have used a remote shutter release too, but forgot to throw it in my pocket.

But nerdy photo-talk is not the point here, cool birds are. I'll hope to share some other hardy boreal birds before long. And hardy they are - every morning saw temperatures well below 0 F, with the mercury plummeting to minus 29 F one memorable morning!

Great Gray Owl

 Photo: Dane Adams

What may be North America's biggest celebrity owl glares balefully at the camera. This Great Gray Owl, Strix nebulosa, turned up near Kingsville, Ontario, Canada on December 23rd. Only very rarely does one of these giant killer puffballs turn up in the southern Great Lakes region - Kingsville is just west of Point Pelee and only some 20 miles north of the Ohio border, on the other side of Lake Erie.

Lots of people have made the trip to see this charismatic owl, photographer Dane Adams among them. Dane sent along a few of his characteristically excellent photos, and allowed me to post them here.

As an aside, Ohio has only two confirmed records of this boreal hooter, the last of which dates to 1947 on a tiny Lake Erie islet dubbed Starve Island. Legendary Ohio ornithologist and bird collector Milton B. Trautman made the observation as he boated from his home on South Bass Island in Lake Erie on a late October day. Starve Island is about 25 miles south of where the Kingsville owl is being seen. That'd be something if this owl decided to island hop into Ohio waters. If it ends up on one of our islands, ferry ticket sales will spike big time, I'll tell you that!

Photo: Dane Adams

As they usually are, this Great Gray Owl is quite tame, and getting good looks presents no problems. Unfortunately, when Great Grays venture this far south, and are active during the day, it sometimes means they are starved and desperate for food. But it should also be noted that owls that breed in the northernmost reaches of the boreal forest belt are often diurnally active during the short days of winter, and excessive tameness and daylight activity do not necessarily mean that the owl is unhealthy. Hopefully this one will fare well and eventually make its way back to its northern haunts.

Great Gray Owls look utterly massive, and they are in terms of physical dimensions. This bird is over two feet in length and its outstretched wings span 4 1/2 feet. That's noticeably larger than a Great Horned Owl. But, the Great Gray Owl only weighs about 2/3rds of the Great Horned, or about the same as The Sibley Guide to Birds.

As would be expected, the Kingsville owl is garnering lots of attention, and not just from birders. CLICK HERE for an article in The Windsor Star about the bird. Be sure and read the comments following the article for a taste of some of the people-related issues that have arisen. Much more in the way of flaming comments have come out on various listservs such as THIS ONE. Some of what is being said is certainly factual, other bits are definitely exaggerated, but the bottom line is everyone should give the owl its space and put the bird's welfare first.

I greatly admire and respect the work of photographers such as Dane Adams, who provided these photos. He and most other lensmen that I know do not harass their subjects, nor do they interfere with birders or other interested people who may also be present. And the results of their work bring the beauty and magic of birds to legions of people who might otherwise never see these species. Frankly, I'm also a little jealous of their 600 or 800 mm lens which allow them to knock off gorgeous shots from afar!

Thanks as always to Dane for sharing his wonderful work.