With yesterday’s post I showed the route I intended to take through the deep boreal wilderness near Minnesota’s border with Canada. I left my small motel 30 minutes before sunrise, and was rewarded with this view ten minutes before sunup.
Shortly thereafter the clouds took over, and light snow began to fall. I timed my entrance onto the back roads west of Big Falls with perfect timing. The light was just bright enough to bird. With dismay early on in my drive I realized that the bird I had just flushed from a spruce (unseen by me) looked like a Great Gray Owl … disappearing into the heavy woods.
200 hundreds down the road I stopped and exited my car. Within seconds the owl appeared another 100 yards down the road … gliding slowly across the road into the forest on the other side of the boggy meadow. My best view was very obstructed, and after waiting ten minutes and losing sight of the Great Gray Owl, I decided to continue my journey. However two miles down the road I had this conversation with myself:
- Self #1: “Maybe the owl will come back out”
- Self #2: “I don’t understand how the owl moved 300 yards that quickly to reappear on the other side of me. Might there be two owls?”
- Self #3: “Nahhh!”
Anyhow I drove back very slowly (4 mph) and quickly spied an owl.
Great Gray Owl #1 (a juvenile, I think)
Suddenly it launched and swooped down towards the ground. Uff dah!!! There was a second Great Gray Owl on the ground not 50 yards away from me. It had just made a kill, and owl #2 (I assume a juvenile) wanted free food.
Great Gray Owl #2 (an adult, I think)
For the next 90 minutes I watched both owls hunt. It was in an area that I had always thought looked like perfect owl habitat. The light was poor, but the owling was fantastic! My only complaint of the morning was the two owls never landed / perched near each other. Owl #1 often flew right at Owl #2, which then always moved. It was too dark for flight photographs.
Ultimately I decided it would be hard to top this experience, and given the amount of time I had spent owling, it was time to head home. Life is good, but the bucket list drive will have to occur another day! And if that is not enough, while typing out this post shortly after 6 pm (very dark here in northern Minnesota … sunset was at 4:25 pm over 90 minutes ago), my local Great Horned Owls are hooting up a storm in my yard. It actually sounds like Poppa Owl and a youngster begging for food. I guess they don’t want me to get too enamored with the “other owls!” (as a fyi … male and female Great Horned Owls have much different pitched level hoots … kids begging is begging the whole world over. Most people would not even recognize the screeches as a juvenile owl begging)
