Spirits of Winter

Snowy Owl
Nikon FE2 with Century 500mm, f5.6
1/250″ @ f8, Fuji 100 @ 200 ASA
manual metering
Gitzo Studex tripod with  Manfrotto 3047 head

The owl had appeared out of thin air and was now perched regally atop a fence post not more than fifty feet away.  I had just wiped my eyes seconds ago and there had been no bird perched on that fence post, let alone an owl.  Now this magnificent white bird was sitting there, staring at me, as if I had lost my senses, as if I had been too engrossed in my work and too blind to have noticed it.

I suppose I would have been only slightly more amazed had I looked up from my camera and spotted a wolf or a catamount loping across the frosty cornfield in front of me.  While I value watching thousands of fireflies twinkling in the meadow behind my house on a sultry evening in June as much as seeing the sun rise over the Grand Canyon and I try not to regard exotic (for me) encounters with nature as any more valuable than the more prosaic wonders of my back yard, I must nevertheless acknowledge that there are indeed those times when an encounter with some aspect of the natural world is so sublime and rare that it transcends all else.  This was one of those times.

Snowy owls, like polar bears, embody the essence of the arctic.  They are emissaries from a world that is about as alien a place as there is on Earth, save for the deep ocean.  Able to thrive in an environment where most of us wouldn’t last a day if left to our own devices, the sight of one just a few feet away here in Vermont would, under normal circumstances, have to be an apparition.  In this case, it was an irruption.

When food, notably lemmings and voles, become scarce up north, the owls are forced to irrupt, that is, fly south out of their home range until they find sufficient rodents to tie them over for the winter.   Periodically, they show up as far south as Boston. This winter, snowy owls are being spotted again all across the northern U.S. from Montana to Massachusetts.

Great Gray Owl on Sumac
Canon EOS3
Canon EF 300mm f/2.8 L IS USM Lens with 1.4x
(Aperture and shutter speed unavailable); Kodak E100G
manual metering
Gitzo tripod with Manfrotto 2047 head

Likewise, great gray owls, a bird more at home in the taiga, or boreal forests of the subarctic six hundred miles north of here, will appear across the northern tier of the U.S. in spells.  A remarkable great gray irruption occurred in 2005 when Rob and I had the rare privilege of photographing several of these largest of owls within walking distance of his house just outside of Montreal!

Great Gray Owl with Vole
Canon EOS3
Canon EF 300mm f/2.8 L IS USM Lens with 1.4x
(Aperture and shutter speed unavailable); Kodak E100G
manual metering
Gitzo tripod with Manfrotto 2047 head

Creatures of the night, owls are hard to see and even harder to spot in broad daylight.  Simply seeing an owl, any owl, is an exciting experience in itself.  Seeing an owl during the day, and one from such a distant and alien land as the arctic is all the more remarkable which is why, I suppose, I was as spellbound at the sight of the snowy suddenly appearing on the fence post next to me as if I had seen a ghost.

Saw Whet Owl
Canon EOS3
Canon EF 300mm f/2.8 L IS USM Lens with 1.4x
1/125 @ f8, Kodak E100G
Canon 550 EX speedlight @ full power, ETTL
handheld

Life, in all it’s varied and wonderful forms, from a bacterium to the giant redwood, is the ultimate case of the whole  transcending the sum of its parts.  From fifty yards away, an owl can hear a vole that is completely hidden under several inches of snow as it nibbles on a seed.  The owl can triangulate the sound and, with pinpoint accuracy, swoop silently from the bough of a tree, dive into the snow, and come up with the hapless rodent in its beak.  Meanwhile, confined to a wheelchair, Stephen Hawking can peer beyond the reaches of the known universe and deduce the possibility that, somewhere, in a parallel universe, there might be another me.  Looking into the eyes of the owl I realize, once again, that one need look no further than life on Earth to find true grace.

Barred Owl
Canon EOS3
 Canon EF 300mm f/2.8 L IS USM Lens with 1.4x
1/200″ @ f4, Kodak E100G
Canon 550 EX Speedlight at full power, ETTL
Gitzo tripod with Manfrotto 2047 head

Come join us in the field this year!  See the exciting list of tours in the sidebar above.

With gratitude and respect,

Gustav