Hawk Owl by Chris Siddle

Guiguet the Great

If you are in your sixties, you may remember when the only detailed information about the owls of the province was to be found in the British Columbia Provincial Museum’s Handbook No. 18 Birds of British Columbia (7) Owls written by C.J. Guiguet. This sixty-seven page booklet, first printed in 1960, reflected the current state of knowledge about most of the owls of North America since B.C. is blessed with 15 of the 18 species that occur regularly north of the Mexican border. At that time there wasn’t much known about many owls, especially northern species like Great Gray Owls, Boreal Owls, and Northern Hawk Owls, not only within British Columbia, but throughout North America. So Mr. Guiguet had to borrow liberally from that preeminent source of information, A.C. Bents’ Life Histories of North American Birds of Prey (Smithsonian Institution U.S. National Museum Bulletin 170 1938). I was twelve when I wrote to Mr. Guiguet, who replied with a kind letter and copies of all the Birds of British Columbia Handbooks published at the time. This was very generous of him.  The tone he adopted in this letter and in a second one sent a year later, was as one birder to another. He took my pre-adolescent bird yearnings seriously, and without criticism. His letters were supportive and phrased as if to a peer and not to a child. How I relished those letters! Guiguet’s gentle enthusiasm help set me on my life’s course, the birding part of it any way.

My First Owls 

I read and re-read the B.C. handbooks as only an obsessive pre-teen can. Not long after reading The Owls for the first time, I lucked into my first wild owl. On a hot August evening my parents and I were slowly driving along a gravel road towards Norris Creek to cool off in the stream’s icy water. I glanced out the side window to see (oh, heart, be still!) a Great Horned Owl glaring at me just before it flew from the alders along the edge of a dark Fraser Valley forest.  Its yellow glare is branded in my mind’s eye even today, the mental image more a part of me than any photo could be. Such wild, dismissive, seemingly angry eyes! 

Great Horned Owl - Not angry-eyed like my first, best Great Horned Owl. Photo by C Siddle. 

 My second owl wasn’t quite as dramatic but provided me with a thrill as I realized that the small shape on the utility wire that stretched over a neighbour’s hillside driveway really was an owl, an owl that allowed me to get close enough to recognize it a Western Screech-owl, an unexpected reward as I walked home at dusk from school. To be shown an owl is good; to find one on your own, along a route as familiar as the one you had walked to and from school, was great. Again, the mental image I formed of this bird is somehow far richer and more meaningful than any photo I could possess. 

By the time I graduated from high school I had been birding about six years and had seen most the other usual owls of southwestern B.C.: Barn, Short-eared, Snowy (during the great invasion of 1967), Northern Saw-whet, and Northern Pygmy-Owl. 

My parents didn’t like travelling, perhaps because as an airman and a WAF they had been moved around a great deal during the Second World. Once settled in Mission they were quite happy to stay home. However, they were unusually supportive of my birdwatching, spending much of their rare spare time taking me on short day trips to birdy places like Pitt Polder, Birch Bay, and Deroche Slough. However, this indulgence did not extend past the Fraser Canyon. So I was excited to escape the Fraser Valley and explore the Interior  when I accepted my first teaching job in Fort St. John. 

Northern Hawk Owls  

On 1 Nov. 1975, two months into teaching, I glimpsed my first Northern Hawk Owl along the Alaska Highway where it curves down the hills on the north side of the little community of Taylor, B.C. Hills like these are locally known as breaks and are prime habitat for Northern Hawk Owls in migration and winter. The breaks line the north and western sides of the Peace and its tributaries like the Halfway and the Beatton rivers. They are also an obvious feature of Highway 29 which runs across the tops of the breaks from Charlie Lake to Hudson Hope.  The breaks are remnant prairie grasslands, much more exposed to the warming sun and the drying prevailing southwest winds than the sheltered, shady and cooler south and east banks which are forested.  In the moist draws between the grassy hill tops are open stands of slim Trembling Aspens, their growth limited by the height of the draw which shields them from desiccating southwest winds. 

On the breaks the snow cover is at its thinnest and the view of the river valley is good. It’s a good place for a hungry Northern Hawk Owl looking for mice, voles, grouse and small birds. The hawk owl is active by day and often unusually tame, allowing the observer a close approach.  As exciting as my “life” sighting was, I couldn’t tarry more than a minute or two near the owl because I was a passenger in a car full of non-birding teachers who had received their first full pay cheques the afternoon before and were headed to Dawson Creek for a Saturday of wining and dining. 

My second hawk owl appeared twenty-two days later along Highway 29 on the breaks above the confluence of the Halfway and Peace rivers. With this bird I was able to take a little more time thanks to a patient driver. This bird was perched in a roadside aspen and allowed me to get within 4 metres without appearing disturbed. It never stopped scanning the snowy grasses. As a test, I had the driver blow the car’s horn. The hawk owl didn’t even flinch, just kept scanning. We left him as the early winter dusk came on and a snow flurry began.

I didn’t see another hawk owl for the next two years. I was too wrapped up in learning to be a school teacher to look for one.  I had a hard time disengaging from work as an English teacher. There was always marking because I believed the only way kids learned to write was to write, and a “good” teacher read over all their work and made suggestions for improvement and left encouraging little comments in the margins. A good teacher also planned. Oh, Lord, did I plan. Every 15 minutes of a lesson was planned if not partially scripted.  In truth I was deeply insecure about my ability as a teacher and I overcompensated my way through my first several Fort St. John winters. 

Between 1975 and 1981 everything I learned about Northern Hawk Owls from field experience could be summarized in a couple of sentences. In the southern half of the North Peace the species appeared most often in March – May and again in November. It often, but not always, favoured, edge habitat such as the breaks. When one discovered a hawk owl, one usually didn’t see much hawk owl behavior other than the bird perched high atop a tree or pole, waiting for prey (voles in late spring and summer; voles and birds the rest of the year) to make its whereabouts known. 

After six years teaching in a junior high school, I had transferred to North Peace Senior Secondary School. Instead of 13-15 years old, I was teaching 16 -18 year olds, teenagers who for the most part were pretty serious about doing well in school. At first even the “town” kids had only two TV channels, and many of the country kids had no TV at all. Many of the students read books, and many had had excellent English teachers in the past, so my job became easier almost overnight. Also, since the senior high school was the only one in the district, my students came from a huge area, including the Alaska Highway from the Peace River north to about Mile 142, west to the Halfway River and east to the Alberta border. By now many people knew that I was the local “birdman” with the result that students and their parents often reported unusual birds to me. In late 1982 a Grade 11 student told me that there were a lot of owls around his parents’ ranch between Fort St. John and Hudson Hope. I followed up the tip and found it quite accurate. 

Northern Hawk Owl - photo taken by Gary Davidson, a thoughtful photographer who makes it a point never to needlessly disturb or harass wildlife just for the sake of an image. 

 Misguided Attempts at Owl Photography

On 11 Dec. my friend Joan, and I found 6 Northern Hawk Owls along less than 30 kilometres of road on the plateau between Cache Creek (not Cache Creek near Kamloops) and the Halfway River. The habitat was ranchland with plenty of large fields, young aspen forest, a beaver swamp, and several patches of Black Spruce muskeg. 

I wondered if any birder had ever seen SIX hawk owls in one day before in British Columbia, but my pondering was short lived, because on 16 January 1983 not only did Joan and I re-locate the original six owls along our original route, but also spotted an additional four closer to Hudson Hope.  It was the most memorable day in my hawk owl experience. Ten hawk owls in one day. 

16 January was also the day we tried an experiment that could only be described as ham handed, and wrong minded. (I was much older than Joan, and should have known better. I take full responsibility for the following stunt). 

 Joan had a wind-up plastic mouse that ran on two wheels instead of back legs. When we discovered that the mouse tended to spin its wheels on the frozen snow, we cut notches along the edges of its wheels to give them grip. Now that the mouse had snow tires, we had to soften its unattractive plastic appearance. A liberal application of white carpenter’s glue over the mouse, followed by a heavy sprinkling of deer hair gave the toy an feral quality, producing a fake mouse that combined, to my mind, the anarchic with the gormless, like Sid Vicious meets Mr. Mole. 

Hawk Owl Number Four was our first test subject. He happened to be a one-eyed individual although that’s not why we picked him. He was perched close to the hard snow on the road’s edge, a good location on which to run our punk rodent. 

About 11 AM Joan wound up the mouse, which we now optimistically called the lure, and let it run along the snow. At once the owl swooped from its aspen perch but perhaps sensing all was not quite right, hovered over the lure without taking it. Hovering is a foraging habit the hawk owl is well known for. The second time we ran the toy mouse, the hawk owl swooped, seized the mouse in one feathery foot and perched with it on the tip of a 15 m White Spruce. For a full minute it perched gripping the mouse but didn’t reach down to attempt to eat the “prey”. Finally it flew with the mouse still its grasp to a snowbank at the edge of the forest and with its back to us mantled over the lure, then flew off, leaving the toy mouse in a depression in the snow.

We tried the lure on three more hawk owls. Bird 5 ignored the mouse entirely.  Bird 6 responded to the lure once we dragged it through the snow attached to fishing line. The owl hovered over the moving prey but didn’t strike and couldn’t be coaxed to leave its perch again. The last bird we pestered was Hawk Owl 2 which flew in from an impressive distance (well over 100 metres), hovered, and then left. 

This was our only day using the toy mouse. We discussed how our meddling was causing the hawk owls to waste precious calories in useless pursuit.  Thereafter that winter we used a dead mouse tied to fishing line as a lure hauled across fresh snow with a rod and reel. and we would let the hawk owl have a mouse at the end of the brief period of attracting. Our objective, beside the dubious but always strong desire to get closer to a creature we admired, was to photograph the hawk owls in action. However, photography at -15 to -25 Celsius proved to be a miserable flop. Film froze and shattered when we advanced it, or was scarred by static in the dry winter air. Our mid-price range 1980s cameras and lenses weren’t up to the task of capturing a crisp hunting hawk owl photo. After a few experiments we gave up.

Learning to Identify with the Owl

With our failure came a lesson learned. We put ourselves in the place of the owl. If as owls we lived on the edge of survival in the harsh Peace River winter, would we have found photographers’ efforts intrusive? Of course.  We could no longer rationalize that we were just two photographers taking up a few minutes of one hawk owl’s day. 

The next time that you see a wild owl, try to remember the situation I described in the paragraphs above. Resist the urge to make a photoshoot out of the situation. Leave the owl alone. Move on. And don’t tell anyone where the owl is, because there’s are always people who won’t/can’t make the effort to imagine themselves in the place of the owl. There are always people who will say to themselves, ‘What could one or two pictures hurt?’ 

If you live in the Lower Mainland or Southern Vancouver Island maybe you have seen the so-called “owl paparazzi” pestering owls. Except it goes way beyond pestering. Some would-be wildlife photographers flush owls repeatedly, checking the backs of their digital cameras each time, always hopeful that the next image will be sharper. People push with their little One Shots,and zoom Canons and Nikons into thickets looking for a better angle and use flash for better detail, and squeak and gibber to get the owl’s attention. They trespass into barns. They carry their long lenses like weapons of war across the salt grass, having ignored signs that tell them how far some owls have migrated just to hunt the foreshore. Photographers always want to get closer.

The cumulative effects of human disturbance on roosting and hunting owls can be massive on a local scale. People will tell you that a photographer is photographing the owl for only a few minutes of its life, but never mention that an owl’s life span is much shorter than a human’s. And where there are many humans and few owls, someone is always waiting in line to photograph the owl when the first guy has finished.