| One
Owl of a Day
For years I have snowshoed all over Banff and Canmore
trying to find these owls that everyone else keeps talking
about.
"Yeah, did you see that HUGE one that landed in the
tree by the Banff Park Lodge?" is a typical conversation
that I will overhear, though truth be told, there really
aren't that many owls in the park compared to more
northerly locations.
Regardless, in April 2001, I was not only owl-less for the
zillionth consecutive winter, but I was stuck sitting in my
office working away on nothing in particular. At about 3
pm, I noticed it was starting to snow outside, so I decided to
head over to Johnson Lake to see if I could find any fresh
tracks in the snow.
Within about ten minutes I came upon fairly fresh wolf
tracks heading south towards the highway and I began following
them.
NOTE TO SELF: ALWAYS
bring camera when trekking through bush. For some reason
known only to my half-dead brain that day, I was walking about
without my camera, which was comfortably stowed in my
car back in the Johnson Lake parking lot.
So of course there I was trudging along through this
ever-deepening snow following these tracks when suddenly I
stopped, looked up and looked right into the eyes of an
absolutely stunningly beautiful sight: a big great gray
owl perched atop a little spruce tree no more than twenty
metres away!!
At first, I was terrified that if I moved, it would fly
away. But then I remembered reading that great grays are
pretty unwary and even often let people approach them fairly
closely.
So I slowly began to move AWAY from the owl and when I was
about fifty metres away and just out of sight behind some
trees, the EPIC began.
Picture this: you have
been sitting in an office working on a computer for weeks
straight, neglecting most physical activity in favour of
watching hockey on tv or eating Danish blue cheese burgers at
your favourite pub. Then suddenly, one day, while it's
snowing and kind of cold outside and you are wearing tons of
clothes and big heavy Sorel boots, you decide that it's VERY
imperative that you run as fast as is humanly possible for two
kilometres back to your car.
Then, just for fun, you pick up your biggest camera lens,
your extra camera body, your heaviest, sturdiest tripod and a
bunch of film and assorted odds and ends and then run back
EVEN faster.
You then arrive back on the scene, gasping desperately for
breath and sweating profusely, only to find that said OWL that
you were after was no longer there.
Finally, you repeat after me,
"&*^^^$#@^!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Thankfully, the gods must have been with me that day, for as
despair began to set in, I noticed the owl about ten trees down
in a little clearing along a stream, staring at me like I was
some kind of lunatic.
Anyways, the rest, as they say, is history....
| Did you know...
...that the gray owl often hunts in
winter by listening for its prey (usually mice) moving
under the snow? When it hears what it's looking
for, it dives slowly and softly from its perch and
pierces the crust of the snow with its legs! While
I stayed and photographed this owl for almost three
hours, I didn't actually get to see it hunt and/or
fly. |
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