Northern Hawk Owl Adventure

Lillian and Jim adventures always start innocently enough. This week Monday it was “Jim, where is Glenfield?”

I know there is only one reason on God’s White Earth that she would want to know where Glenfield is: someone’s spotted a rare bird there.

I bit. “It’s between Carrington and Cooperstown.” And then, opening the door wide: “Why?”

“A guy on my listserv says there is a northern hawk owl there . . . (about a three second pause) . . . tomorrow?”

Well, of course, tomorrow. That is the joy of being retired. That is why we worked all those years, so that when a northern hawk owl appears in Glenfield, North Dakota, we can appear there to observe it.

The listserv message from someone at Valley City State University, which arrived about lunchtime Monday, January 24, read “I went through Glenfield on Friday, January 21 and the Northern Hawk Owl is still there. It was sitting atop a tree on the north side of highway 200 (right before you get to the intersection of 200 and 20.)”

Lillian is a devoted birder, I’ve told you before. Driving 150 miles to put a new bird on your life list is a reasonable thing to do. So we did.

We drove through a world of white, arrived in Glenfield, drove to the intersection, drove north, then south, then east, then west, then all around town, slowly, perusing the stark trees, to no avail. There’s a lot of snow out there in north-central North Dakota. In Glenfield, the city crew had cleaned Main Street and School Street (that’s the actual name on the street sign of the street the school is on) and then just cleared a path through the rest of the town’s streets, leaving banks on both sides higher than my head, and then gone back with a front end loader and tunneled into the driveways of the few occupied houses left in town. Thoughtful.

After an hour or driving very slowly on the streets and highways around Glenfield, we were ready to admit defeat, but Lillian said “Let’s drive a little ways east one more time, and she did. We spotted it at the same time. It was perched high atop a tree at the far end of a shelterbelt running perpendicular to Highway 200, probably 250 yards off the highway, just east of town. I could see Lillian looking at the same thing I was, and I said “That’s not big enough to be . . .” and she cut me off with “Yes, it is.” She pulled into the driveway of the shop beside the shelterbelt, a metal building with a couple pieces of machinery and a purple Jeep Grand Cherokee, all plugged in and ready to start, beside it, and grabbed the binoculars.

“That’s it!”

The Northern Hawk Owl is about the size of a crow, with a typical owl face, no visible ears or neck, but with kind of a long pointy tail, unlike most owls, more like a hawk (hence its name, I suppose) and when it flies, it looks much like a kestrel. It flew after we had observed it for about 15 minutes, disappeared behind the building, and then miraculously flew right to the top of a tree right beside our car and perched on the tip-top branch of a Siberian Elm, about 60-70 feet up, I suppose. We watched it there for quite a long time, snapped a few pictures with our point and shoot camera, and then left it there and headed home. We sent a picture of the bird against Tuesday’s bright blue sky, a great break from this dreary white-sky winter, to a birder friend in Grand Forks, and he wrote back that it couldn’t possibly have been taken in North Dakota because the sky isn’t that color here.

The Northern Hawk Owl is not a North Dakota bird, so seeing one is rare here, and a birder’s delight. You can learn more about it and see better pictures here. According to Lillian’s bird books, it is found in the boreal forests of North America and Eurasia usually on the edges of more open woodland. It is not migratory but occasionally will fly south of its breeding range (which this one seems to have done, settling in Glenfield for the winter). It waits on a perch and takes advantage of its rapid flight to overtake prey. The Northern Hawk Owl has exceptional hearing and can plunge into snow to capture rodents below the surface. I wish we’d have seen that!

For the record, Lillian counted the birds on her life list this morning, and announced the Northern Hawk Owl was her 350th North American species. Pretty amazing. I’ve decided birding is a great hobby. We got to spend an entire day driving across North Dakota, accomplished what we had set out to do, and all it cost us was 30 bucks worth of gas and 11 dollars for two Subway sandwiches in Jamestown. Keep those listserv messages coming!