Chippewa County, MI

Easily my favorite grosbeak, with apologies to the rose-breasted, the blue, and the evening. This flock was another lucky find during the Michigan Audobon Winter Birding trip.

In a certain sense, a lot of birding is about delayed and uncertain gratification. You set out looking for a bird in the woods and the entire forest is quiet that day; you follow a rare bird alert and pull up to the spot just to find that the bird flew away five minutes ago, never to be seen again. Sometimes you spend months looking for something only for it never to materialize anywhere.

I like that aspect of it. There's a lot of instant gratification in modern life, a lot of smoothing away of friction. The value of doing any given thing is measured chiefly by its outcome and how little time and effort it took to achieve that outcome. Maximize efficiency, maximize productivity, and on and on and on (can you tell I work in tech in the age of AI?).

Finding this owl was no efficient operation, and thank god for that. We spent hours trundling along the rural roads of Chippewa County, seeing only ravens, squinting painstakingly at every roof, fencepost, and tree. It was a bright day and the entire landscape was blanketed in snow; the blinding whiteness made every oddly shaped drift of snow look like an owl. Owl or no owl, there's something very human and satisfying about spending time with other people doing nothing but paying close and undivided attention to the natural world, just looking at stuff and thinking about it and talking about it together. Even if the journey is fruitless in terms of good sightings or showoff pictures, there's something there, at least for me.

Of course, sometimes the process does produce, and we got lucky that day. When someone pointed out this stunning adult male resting atop a travel trailer, we were looking at his back and I would've sworn he was just another mound of snow. Eventually he turned to face us, and - oh my god, after hours and hours of nothing - a snowy owl.

Snowy owls have these beautiful clear golden eyes and I watched him watch us with a growing sense of wonder. Having spent so long looking for him, finding him felt like a minor miracle in a way that it wouldn't have if the sighting had come more easily. Efficiency and productivity can give you many things, but they cannot put you in touch with awe or appreciation or gratitude. Shoutout to delayed and uncertain gratification, and to every cliche about the journey, not the destination, being the point.

This owl was an incredible find at the very end of a long, cold day of birding in the UP with a Michigan Audubon group. It was an unusually wintry winter that year. Snowbanks drifted up hip height everywhere and windchill temperatures were deep in the negative teens for the entire trip. We trooped around Chippewa County by car caravan, binoculars pressed to the windows, heaters on high, and saw all kinds of things - Bohemian waxwings, evening grosbeaks, sharp-tailed grouse. I hadn’t been able to feel my feet for hours and everyone looked tired, but when our guide said that there had been Great Gray sightings nearby and we could go check it out if we wanted, no one hesitated to get back on the road.

We hadn’t been looking long when the guide accidentally flushed the owl from a pine thicket, and we relocated him quickly atop a nearby tree. If you’ve never been in a group of birders who have all just found a rare and beautiful bird together, I really can’t recommend the experience enough. There aren’t many places in modern life where you can stand together with people you just met the day before, totally united in uncomplicated wonder and awe and gratitude - gratitude that we are alive and the owl is alive and we are all here together, in spite of everything. The owl is so vanishingly rare that one of our guides - a professional birder - had never seen one before.

We stood there for a long time as the sun went down and the temperature tipped to polar. Eventually, long after my fingers were too stiff to manipulate the buttons on my camera, we decamped to the indoors, exhausted and freezing, grateful and lucky.