Gray Ghost of the Northern Woods

by Kevin Strauss

The great gray owl is the closest thing to a ghost that I have seen in the northern woods. For one thing, they are rare, only occasionally seen in our region. They are also big, 2 1/2 feet tall with a 12-inch tail. And despite their size, they are completely silent in flight.

I saw my first great gray 10 years ago on a snowy roadside near Finland, MN. The owl sat looking down at me from the high bare branch of a dead pine tree. It sat there long enough for me to get out of my car and take a few steps toward it, before it opened its huge five-foot-wide wings and silently flew away. At first I thought there must be something wrong with my hearing. I couldn’t believe that a bird that large could be so silent in flight. But it was.

Great gray owls are nothing if not impressive. During the winter, you are most likely to find these hunters perched in a tree at the edge of a meadow. They lean forward on their perches and seem to be staring at the snow below them. Then, at a signal too small for our ears to detect, the owl rises from its perch and plunges into the fluffy snow. When it emerges, more likely than not, it holds a deer mouse or vole in one of its taloned feet.

The reason this owl can find and grab these rodents is it’s incredible sense of hearing. Some scientists estimate that a great gray owl can hear a mouse squeak a half-mile away. The owl’s offset ears also let it “triangulate” on sounds and pinpoint a mouse, even if the owl can’t see it, in the dark or under up to 18 inches of fluffy snow. This is an important skill for the owl, because their rodent prey spends most of the winter running in mouse-made tunnels beneath the snow.
Great gray owls eat their rodent prey whole on the spot and then return to a perch to digest their meal. Later they spit out “owl pellets” of undigestible fur and bones. In summer, a great gray will eat about four mice a day. But in the cold of winter, when owls need more energy to stay warm, they will eat as many mice as they can find, easily twice that number.
Great gray owls, though rare, can be found on the branches of trees in black spruce-tamarack swamps or at the edge of meadows in the northcountry.

While these owls have excellent night-vision, they also have good day-vision and can sometimes be seen “sunbathing” during our short winter days. So don’t assume that a “night-owl” can’t be a “day-owl” as well.