Wolf Ridge's Mystery Owl

A small owl of boreal and montane forests, the Boreal Owl is found throughout Alaska and Canada, and across northern Eurasia, as well. It is found in the lower 48 states only in the mountains of the West, in extreme northern Minnesota, and as an occasional winter visitor to the northern states.

I was doing a bird banding presentation for a class yesterday morning. I started it as I always do, by asking the kids what birds they'd seen today. One girl started listing the usual cast of characters: "black-capped chickadees, red-breasted nuthatches, common redpolls, a hawk owl, downy woodpeckers..."

"Hang on just a second there," I cut her off. "Did you say hawk owl?" Their naturalist, Robyn, nodded and smiled. I thought that maybe the kids had thought they'd seen a Northern hawk owl and Robyn was letting them enjoy that rather than correcting them. But they all insisted, and when Joe (a significantly experienced naturalist evaluating the class at the time) also confirmed the sighting, I found myself stumbling for words, until I finally sputtered something like, "you saw an owl and didn't come and get me?!"

Small owl; no ear tufts; white face outlined in black; fine spots on top of head; underparts dirty white, streaked with brown; bill yellow.

After teaching her class about bird banding, I booked it back to my office to grab a camera and took off for Chickadee Landing, the location of the owl sighting. With five or six other naturalists in tow, we started scanning the trees for the little ball of fluff allegedly perched above us. We scanned the area for about fifteen minutes, and I even tried playing some hawk owl calls on my iphone, but to no avail.

Lives in boreal forests with spruce, aspen, poplar, birch, and balsam fir. In mountains of West, found in subalpine forests of fir and spruce.

At lunch, I learned from Robyn that our owl was not perched out in the open, as I had originally thought, but rather, tucked back into the branches of a spruce tree. She offered to take Tessa, Dan (more WR nats) and me back out to look for the little guy one more time. And thank goodness we returned, because as soon as we arrived, "oh sure, he's right where I left him," Robyn declared.

Diet: small mammals, birds, and insects.

Sure enough, tucked into the branches of a spruce tree sat a very passive owl. Clearly content with just hanging out, it would occasionally look our way, especially as we got closer, but otherwise, seemed entirely unperturbed by our presence. In fact, we were probably the least of its concerns, given the many black-capped chickadees noisily flitting about in its tree. We really hoped this owl might take an opportunity to make a meal out of one of them, but instead, it continued to sit. This is normal behavior for owls during the day - quietly hanging out and minding their own business.

Boreal owls usually are considered monogamous, with one male mating with one female. Several studies in Europe found that one male may mate with up to three females, and a female occasionally mates with two different males. They found that such multiple mating occurs most frequently when mice numbers are at their highest. (Finding easy prey to feed the young means that less help is needed in raising young owls.) When mice numbers are low, all the owls were monogamous.

When we first saw the owl, we instinctively found ourselves questioning its original identification as a hawk owl. I suggested that maybe it was a boreal, but we immediately brushed off that suggestion given the size; this owl looked much bigger than the boreal owls we'd seen in captivity or taxidermied. Plus, the other naturalists had already identified it as a Northern hawk owl - why question that? However, last night when I posted a picture and blog entry about the owl sighting labeled as a Northern hawk owl, I almost immediately got a phone call from my raptor banding mentor at Hawk Ridge, Frank, informing me that the image was definitely a boreal owl. And that makes sense. The tail is short and rounded, there is no horizontal barring on the front, and this is an irruption year for boreal owls, meaning that they are being spotted all over the place in northern Minnesota (I'll write more about this in a future blog entry). This particular boreal owl just so happened to be quite large. Or maybe it was just a female.

The female boreal owl is much larger than the male. The species shows the most extreme reversed sexual dimorphism (the phenomenon in the raptor world where the female is larger than the male) of any American owl.

"It makes you wonder how often we miss these kinds of things," Tessa mused, as we watched the owl peacefully perched in its tree. We would not have noticed this owl if Robyn hadn't taken us back out and pointed its exact location. How many other awesome plants and animals are we missing every single time we go outside because of their passive, reclusive nature and our inability to catch every detail?

(Field guide notes from:  http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Boreal_Owl/id)