Great gray owl

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.