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| Great Grey Owl |
A friend of mine and fellow ‘watcher,’ Chris O’Brien, just
sent me her essay on watching a great grey owl.
Most of her essay involved the thrill of actually watching a great grey
in the wild, but she also did a great job of describing the owl’s mass of
feathers. Chris explained our ‘largest
owl’ really isn’t our largest. I know
that doesn’t make sense. Bear with
me. With Chris’s permission, I’m going
to paraphrase some of what Chris wrote about great grey owls:
Great grey
owls are magnificent. They're dimensionally the largest owls in North America,
but they're mostly feathers. The first great grey owl I ever handled was killed
by a car. The owl's body was huge, but lighter than it appeared. I poked my
fingers into its head feathers, they sank the length of my forefinger before
they reached bone. Picture its nine-inch-across head: three inches of feathers,
three inches of skull, and three more inches of feathers. Wow!
The largest
common owl in the United States is the great horned owl, which can take prey up
to the size of a several-pound skunk, rabbit or cat; the diet of the “larger
but smaller” great grey is primarily ounce-sized voles and other small mammals.
Having handled both, I can attest that great horned owl feet and talons are
much, much more powerful than those of great greys. Here are average dimensions
(variation is due to sexual dimorphism; as in most birds of prey, females are
larger than males).
Length - Wingspan - Weight - Weight
Great Grey
Owl 24”-33“ 54”-60” 24-60 oz 700-1700 g
Great
Horned Owl 18”-24” 39”-43” 32-88 oz 910-2500 g”
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| "Mortimer", my mother's tame barred owl. |
Reading Chris’s description of all those feathers heaped upon great
grey owl’s body reminded me of an illustrating challenge I faced years
ago. I was illustrating “Birds of Prey
of Wisconsin” for my mother, Frances Hamerstrom. She wanted to draw the relative size of a
barred owl’s body in relationship to the actual size of the barred owl. The barred owl is another really fluffy owl.
My immediate response was, “But how? I can’t create this out of my imagination.” –
No problem. My mother promised to send
me a dead barred owl, another victim of our highways. She would airmail me a frozen owl packed with
dry ice. It would stay nice and fresh
for the trip.
But fate in the form on a late spring blizzard intervened. The owl didn’t arrive and didn’t arrive. The mail wasn’t moving on schedule. I stayed home at least two extra days waiting
and then needed to make a grocery run. I
asked the nice marine living next door would he please be sure and watch for
the mailman and sign for the package?
Of course he would.
Still no package. That
evening I was just sitting down to dinner when the phone rang. “This is the
Post Office. You have a package here
that you really need to pick up – RIGHT NOW!
It smells! We’ll stay open until
you get here.”
I went tearing out the door only to find my marine neighbor
laughing himself to tears. He’d muffled
his voice and mimicked the post office. ….
But, still no package.
Fortunately my long-delayed owl arrived the next day and the dry
ice had done its job.
But I wasn’t quite out of the woods yet. At the time our twins were around two years
old and a bit of a handful when I wanted to sit down and ‘do art.’ For once I hired a baby sitter for the
afternoon and took the owl out of the freezer early in the morning. By late morning I realized my darn owl wasn’t
thawing. The feathers were
insulating it. … and I had the baby sitter coming.
I had two choices. Either
roast my owl in the oven, or hang it in the sun on my cloths line. The cloths line idea won.
So if you ever drive by my house and see something very odd on my
cloths line, just remember there might be a good reason.
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| My illustration of the barred owl and all its feathers. |
