Great Gray Gimmicks

Great Grays are the tallest owl found in Minnesota, but far from the heaviest – they’re mostly fluff, a deceptive mass of feathers and air, far outweighed by the Great Horned. This isn’t to say that they disappoint; a sighting of a Great Gray will invariably have people pulling over on the side of the road to gape.

There’s a few resident birds, but they are uncommon and elusive enough to rarely be seen, living out their solitary lives in solitary places. Every few years, though, birds come down from Canada, driven by their population cycles that leave far too few mice in their homeland forests.

It isn’t hard to figure out why Great Grays get so much attention. If an owl can be sexy, this one is – sleek but imposing, with a fierce expression and regal impression. They often take the place at the top of birder’s lists, and tempt even the non-initiated into a brief foray of the birding world.

Cue my entrance.

If you want to see an owl but aren’t a birder, my best advice is to befriend one. It’s a close-knit community, sharing hot locations between the trusted few while tossing lectures of birding ethics to the unenlightened. I’m lucky enough to know a couple birders that know their material and are happy to let me tag along for the day, so I cajoled myself into a Saturday trip up Minnesota’s North Shore in search of the gray feathered specters. Ryan is a graduate student with research focuses on owls; Steve, also a graduate student, studies nightjars. They contrast in more ways than not: Steve’s tall and lanky build is exaggerated by flowing hair, while Ryan is shorter, stocky, and often described by his dwarven beard.

We’ve got high numbers this year. Steve recently tracked down a dozen in one day. To put this in perspective, those that aren’t lucky enough to live on a migration corridor will go for years without seeing one – and that’s in the relatively small part of the U.S. where they even live. I kept my expectations low and my hopes high.

Rewarded: we managed to track down four of them over the course of the morning, between Duluth and Palisade Head. The circus was out in masse; the arrival of the owls had recently reached the public awareness, and roadsides were littered with abandoned tripods and amateur photographers.

Wildlife photography is hard. You don’t get to plan your photos around the best weather and conditions because it will always be there, like landscape photography. You don’t get a calendar of events, when and where they’ll occur, like action sport photography. You can’t call up an owl on the phone and ask if they want to do some portrait work. It’s frustrating and it’s time consuming and it all too often ends with no good result. That’s why we love it, and that’s why we go crazy over owl irruptions.

Unfortunately, as happens all too often, the best in nature can bring out the worst in us. Great Gray Owls are intriguing not only by appearance but also by behavior; unafraid of humans, they’ll allow you to approach relatively close. They’re also aggressive hunters, and it’s not uncommon to see amateur (and even professional) photographers releasing captive mice to “bait” the owls closer for a better shot (this practice is heavily frowned upon by most experienced birders). Today, we saw this all take place on a roadside, orchestrated by a National Geographic photographer.

I wasn’t sure what was happening when I got out of the car, but could see that they had lenses much larger than mine – these guys were serious. They were off the road a couple dozen yards behind a “no trespass” sign and had their cameras pointed straight up; I realized with a shock that the owl was right there, ludicrously close, and the best possible situation for a photo.

But they were obviously baiting – and, what’s more, trespassing. I walked back to the car in time to see Ryan and Steve exchange agitated looks. Steve turned the key in the ignition and started the car.

“Let’s get out of here. I don’t want to be part of this”.

Thirty minutes later and post-Subway order, we discussed what we had seen. I asked if baiting was frowned upon because it brought the owl too close to people.

Ryan looked at me across the table and over his Meatball Marinara. “Yeah, there’s that. But the worst part isn’t even that they get stressed from people or that everyone’s too close, although that’s probably a factor. But these birds are learning to associate people with food – and they get used to coming down to the road to get it, where people bait them. Then they get hit.”

One local birder we ran into the same day told us that a great gray had just been found dead on the road.

“But those guys were also trespassing. Now, I don’t really give a shit about property rights, but these are people that let birders come on their land and look at stuff when you have the sense to ask permission. And when people ignore the no trespass signs, they get mad… pretty soon, they aren’t letting anyone onto their land anymore.”

And so I wonder if we don’t, perhaps, have a propensity to destroy the things that mean the most to us. I see it all the time; ice fishermen who leave beer cans on the ice, backpackers who leave trash in the woods. Mountain bikers that rut out the muddy trails and, apparently, there are even birders who are bad for the birds. I offer up to Ryan the example that floats to memory: salmon fishermen, frenzied by the spectacle of large fish en masse, wading into the river and clubbing them with sticks, pitchforking them onto the banks like so many bales of slimy, scaly hay. 

“Yeah, it’s the same sort of thing. It’s like anything else, you know. Good and bad in every bunch.”

And I do know. I sheepishly admit to Ryan and Steve how tempted I was to take advantage of the situation and get some shots – there’s no denying that they would have been incredible photos. I stood in the road and I looked back into the woods and I looked at Steve putting the car into drive, looking back at me expectantly and waiting for my choice.

I want a good photo of a Great Gray incredibly bad. I think they’re beautiful animals, and I love the way they move and the way they swivel and the way that they survey you with haughty eyes. I love that they’re hard to find and so I love to find them. I love to share their beauty so that you can look at a photo and see yes, they are beautiful, and perhaps Bradley isn’t crazy to wake up at five thirty on a Saturday to go look for them.

But every person has to decide the lengths they are willing to go for a photo. That length should never come to the point where it is putting the subject in danger or a compromising position, and I have too much respect for a creature like a Great Gray to weaning it onto my handouts.

Don’t get me wrong – baiting an owl is not the worst offense that I’ve seen people do to wildlife. It doesn’t mean certain death for the owl, and it doesn’t make someone a bad person. What’s more, the actions of one photographer don’t dictate the mentality of whole organization, and National Geographic doesn’t suddenly lose my respect because of this incident. But this kind of choice does reflect a tipping point – are you recording your subjects, or are you exploiting them?

A photo from National Geographic. This photo was almost certainly staged with a mouse as bait.

We left the area and ended up on a lonely trail in state land where Steve had seen one before. We crunched along in the snow and his arm came up, pointing ahead of me. The bird was perched on a tree, head swiveling as it hunted. I saw the eyes rest on me briefly and then it was silently gone, no released mouse to lure it closer.