As dusk settles into the hardwoods, a dark apparition with moth-like flight begins to glide silently past snow-laden tree limbs, coming to rest on a low branch overlooking the trail. The deepening wood conceals this sentinel for 20 minutes. A rabbit ventures onto the path.
The creature in the tree swivels its head, listens and watches carefully through the gathering gloom. When the hare fatefully turns the other way, the form slips from the limb, gliding silently forward.
The rabbit turns back to behold a horror of swooping, flared wings and legs with out-stretched talons dangling like twin grappling hooks. Knocked over by their impact, its screams pierce the night.
Gradually the shrieking becomes gagged and feeble, until silence once again descends over the forest. The hunter deftly decapitates the carcass with a twisting bite of its beak. The barred owl mutters one short, chortling hoot to signal success to its mate. This is the equivalent of "Steaks are on the barbecue, honey."
Owls are uniquely adapted for hunting in dim light. With 14 joints in their necks, great horned owls can rotate their heads 270 degrees without turning their bodies-an asset when minimizing movement means avoiding detection. Owls and penguins are the only groups of birds with eyes in the front of the head. This provides them with an exceptionally wide angle of binocular vision. Owl eyes are large and specially adapted for low light conditions, gathering minute detail, and providing incredible depth perception.
The eyes, however, are immobile in their sockets. Owls move their heads around, not their eyes, to see. Ears in some owl species are located higher on one side of their head than on the other. This endows them with differential hearing, or "3D" noise perception. A mouse that hiccups under moss on a windless night would probably be located from 30 metres (98 feet) or more away. Great gray owls can hear and catch a mouse scurrying through tunnels under 30 cm (1 foot) of snow.
Owls also have a special serrated fringe on the leading edge of wing feathers to muffle air noise. Forgoing speed, they approach instead with the element of silent surprise. When they care to, many owls emit a variety of calls. Some sounds are disconcertingly human and eerie. Several owls possess the kind of bloodcurdling shriek that can become fodder for "haunted" fables. Canada is home to 15 native owl species. Eleven species have been identified in Saltscapes country. Our common larger owls are the great horned owl and the barred owl. Great horned owls are so well-adapted as predators that they are apparently unable to construct their own nest. They commandeer an eagle, osprey, hawk, raven or crow nest, often as early as February or March, when it is unoccupied.
Eggs are laid over a period of days, so that the two or three hatchlings in the same nest range in size from small to large. In a year with scarce food supplies, even-sized youngsters might prove equal in food fights-and all starve. Uneven sizes give the largest youngster a better chance of survival during a lean season. Great horned pairs have been known to take over a crow's nest in town, demonstrating a slight insensitivity to smell by dining on local skunks. These unusual residents act as crow, pigeon and cat control officers.
Every town should have a pair! Great horned owls have ear tufts, not horns, which are used for courtship displays. They possess piercing yellow eyes, a monotone hoot and a propensity to win "talon shows" with claws that can travel through the palm of your hand like a hot knife through butter. Barred owls have dark brown eyes and a lower breast streaked with vertical brown bars on an off-white background. They prefer to nest in the holes or cavities of large trees. Such old trees are becoming scarce commodities, so my wife and I built a nest box for the pair we hear year-round in our neck of the woods. Barred owls call with a melodious mix of "who-who-whos," combined with "who-who-whoahhs," chortles and other weird sounds. The pair were regularly holding a hootenany by the brook, so last February we snowshoed in with the box and a ladder to put it up.
Barred and great horned owls perch near or over water at dusk and study the surface carefully as trout and other species fish begin to move through the shallows. Fishing for them is probably akin to hunting mice under grass, moss or snow. As someone who looked after young and injured wildlife for about 20 years, I received many calls about a "baby owl" in trouble. They were, in fact, saw-whet owls-diminutive but spunky little characters that hunt large insects like moths, as well as mice. Saw-whets have a tough time locating food with winter's snow cover. They may frequent bird feeders at night for the rodents that scavenge seeds.
Saw-whets usually seek out an abandoned flicker or woodpecker hole for nesting each spring, but will use nest boxes. Their call is a monotone toot, like the sound of a saw-tooth being sharpened with a file. One inquisitive saw-whet encountered my equally curious wife in our woods recently. My wife spoke to it as it flew back and forth on the closest trees, peering at her in the fading light. It even followed her along the trail for some distance, letting her pass repeatedly as close as a metre away. The great grey owl, the largest in North America, is rarely seen in Atlantic Canada.
I spotted one last December while travelling along the Saint John River south of Fredericton. One ponderous wing beat of this creature can cover 12 metres. It was hard to mistake! Rare Maritime owl species include the barn owl, a rodent specialist, and the Eastern screech owl, a small owl with a notable voice. Boreal owls are only slightly larger than saw-whets. In parts of northern New Brunswick and in the Cape Breton Highlands, one might see the northern hawk-owl, a boreal forest bird that acts more like a hawk.
Long-eared owls look like small great-horned owls, and have a cat-like whine. Short-eared owls are open country, daytime hunters. When lemming populations crash in the Arctic, the Atlantic provinces become a temporary refuge for snowy owls, also rare and beautiful visitors. My fascination with owls comes from experiences as a biologist raising young owls and helping injured adults. One special memory is of a great horned owl that arrived one day with a face full of porcupine quills. After the quills were removed, one eye remained shut.
A local veterinarian provided a salve that I had to put on its face daily. A ritual began with every sunset in the pen. Before long the owl was allowing me to apply the ointment without clawing or biting. After two weeks, the eye opened, revealing one last quill. I called the vet for help. Could I bring it to her office? She agreed. I went to the pen and caught the owl.
It didn't resist, and lay quietly in my arm. Removing the tweezers from a Swiss army knife with my free hand, I carefully plucked the quill from the eye. The owl didn't even flinch. Its eyelid, however, was damaged, so I kept the bird for another week. Checking it one evening, I entered the cage, flashlight in hand. I turned off the light and stood still. The owl came off a high perch, swooped down and landed about 30cm (a foot) in front of my face! It waited. I turned on the flashlight and examined its eyelid, which had healed at last. Off went the light and we stood alone, face to face in the darkness, for a minute. Finally I said goodbye, and left the pen door open. The next morning it was gone. That great-horned knew I was trying to help. Perhaps owls really are wise!