Singing Great Grey Owl!

I had a little teaser of a Great Grey Owl a couple of tweets ago and it is now time to give him the attention he deserves. I have previously mentioned hearing a distant singing bird a few weeks ago and had been planning on how I could search the area better later in the spring to ascertain whether there was breeding. There is still far too much snow currently though for any serious forest exploration but that doesn’t stop you listening from roads. On Thursday night I had to pick up Jr from the airport just after midnight so this was all the excuse I needed to do some owling on the way and with it getting dark around 8pm I could fit quite a bit in. The weather wasn’t ideal with some drizzle in the air but it wasn’t too windy although the noise of running water has now become a problem.

On my drive up a Long-eared Owl flew in front of the car which felt like a good omen but once in the deep forests my frequent stops proved frustratingly quiet. Until…… Boom a GG was singing seemingly very close to where I had stopped. I turned on the head torch and it was singing from a wire by the road!!! It quickly flew over the road and landed in a tree and kept on singing. It then basically sang from the same area for the next two hours. It looked like it was often looking for food at the same time as singing and must have been unpaired to be singing so constantly. The fact I did not hear a single other owl the whole evening suggests that rodent numbers are falling off and it will not be an owl year but clearly this particular bird had not given up (yet).

It was truly amazing to watch him sing illuminated in my head torch as he sang just metres from me. The deep hooting does not sound much louder at 10 metres than it does at over half a kilometre and is even harder to record satisfactorily with a (my) mobile phone or camera. You can hear it well enough in my recordings though and also see how the throat pumps as it hoots.

So that is an item on the bucket list ticked off and time to turn my attentions to Ural Owl and Eagle Owl maybe. I have never heard Ural Owl singing although have seen it very well and Eagle Owl I have seen and heard singing at distance but would love to experience much better.

Great Grey Owl (lappugle)

how I was taking the pictures and video. The camera was on a tripod (for once) and the bird illuminated with my head torch