I had a great morning up in Sax-Zim Bog watching Great Gray Owls … many of them! In fact over the past two weeks I have seen quite a few Great Gray Owls throughout Northeastern Minnesota (not just Sax-Zim Bog). Yesterday over one hundred miles from the Bog I saw owls both in the morning and the early afternoon … with a break in between for church. About nine days earlier I saw some Great Grays in a totally different part of NE Minnesota. My point is our local owls seemed to have had a decent time this year raising owlets. I suspect a lot of the birds I am seeing right now are juveniles who are lousy hunters, and thus have to spend more time in search of prey.

Part of the reason for my success over the past two days in seeing owls is the weather had been ugly for many, many days which prevented Great Grays from successfully hunting. Normally I would never have looked for owls this morning. It was windy and very sunny which are NOT conditions which encourage owls to hunt, but if you are hungry …

Here is a picture of a Gray Jay / Canada Jay taken two days ago. Note how the bird is drenched. As noted the weather has been horrible.

As noted the sun finally returned this morning. Can you image having this experience??! I talked with the young couple and their car had an “open moon roof”. Perhaps the wife looked like a meadow vole!

Here are some more images from this morning. A good time was had by all (specially me, or at least me and the couple in the car).