Owl ‘irruption’ brings joy for birders, concerns for owls in northeast Minnesota
Go Deeper.
Create an account or log in to save stories.
Like this?
Thanks for liking this story! We have added it to a list of your favorite stories.
In early January Michaela Rice, a naturalist with the Minnesota Department of Resources, received a report of a dead owl along Highway 61. It was near Gooseberry Falls State Park along the North Shore of Lake Superior where she works.
When Rice went to retrieve it, they thought it was a turkey, it was so big.
“It was incredibly light carcass. It felt like it was made out of Styrofoam,” Rice recalled.
But the huge, round facial disc gave it away. It was a great gray owl, which at about 2 feet is North America’s tallest owl, with a 5-foot wingspan.
Turn Up Your Support
MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all.
“Their whole body is covered in this dense down that you would maybe expect to find on a Angora rabbit. It was unbelievable,” Rice said. “All the bones were totally just crushed. It felt like I was kind of holding bubble wrap.”
It felt like an emotional gut punch, Rice said, especially knowing that several great grays have been struck and killed by vehicles this year.
“These birds live in areas where they don’t encounter people, and they are so camouflaged. Their wings look like bark. Their body looks like a tree. And so they rely on that camouflage, and they don't think people can see them,” they said.
But this winter, hordes of people are seeing them. They’ve come from all over the country, and even overseas, because of a phenomenon known as an irruption.
Owls that live in the boreal forest in Canada, hundreds of miles away — great grays, boreal and northern hawk owls — have flown south to northeastern Minnesota in search of their preferred food, small rodents called voles.
Irruptions occur after large numbers of baby owls are hatched the year before, and then the following year, there’s not enough food for all of them. This is the largest owl irruption in Minnesota in two decades.
“We call it the invasion of the vole snatchers,” said Sparky Stensaas, executive director of Friends of Sax-Zim Bog, where many of the owls are headed. The area is some of the most southernmost boreal forest, about 25,000 acres of prime bird habitat about an hour’s drive outside Duluth.
And along with the influx of owls from Canada, has come an influx of people from around the world, said Stensaas. Recent visitors came from Hawaii and Poland.
“Boreal owls, great gray owls. They’re bucket list birds for people, no doubt, and that’s why folks come here,” he said.
Monday morning in Two Harbors, 26 people were lined up, photographing a single great gray.
Michelle VanRossum came to the area last week from Rhode Island. She stopped along Highway 61 north of Two Harbors with her tour group to photograph Split Rock Lighthouse with her giant telephoto lens.
“I’m kind of obsessed with owls. They’re just magical,” said VanRossum.
In a single day last week she saw great gray owls hunting, a northern hawk owl, and a small boreal owl. That last one is difficult to see because it’s so small and typically feeds at night.
“The boreal owl literally came from out of the woods and perched right in front of us with the sun on him. It’s a once in a lifetime experience,” she said.
But the irruption is an end of a lifetime for some of the owls.
Several have been found dead along roadways. And people have brought injured owls to rehab centers such as Wildwoods in Duluth, which has taken in 19 owls so far this winter.
“There’s one day we admitted five owls in one day. That’s a really big owl day. Very unusual,” said Valerie Slocum, the director of animal rehabilitation at Wildwoods.
Most were hit by vehicles.
“Owls are predators, and so their eyes are fixed in the front of their face, and they don’t have very good peripheral vision,” Slocum explained. “And so if they’re flying across the road, they don’t necessarily see the car that’s coming towards them right away.”
Slocum is able to care for some owls but many don’t survive. She sends owls that may recover to The Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul.
Dana Franzen-Klein, the medical director there, says they’ve received nine great grays this year. That’s more than a typical winter, but nowhere close to the number during a massive irruption 20 years ago, when the center admitted more than one hundred great grays.
Of the nine great grays admitted so far this year, only one has survived. It’s currently recovering from a fractured wing.
Veterinarians there perform surgeries, even on tiny boreal owls. They also will treat wounded raptors with physical therapy, by rotating their wings, for example, to help them regain their range of motion. But often it’s impossible to rehabilitate them.
“A lot of the birds that come into us have really severe injuries, and we cannot always fix it,” said Franzen-Klein. If they don’t think an animal can make it back to the wild, or do well in captivity, “euthanasia is the kindest gift we can offer them,” she said.
Franzen-Klein and other experts plead with people to give owls space.
“If you get too close, they’ll feel that there’s a threat, and they will fly away,” said Frank Nicoletti, a senior researcher at Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory in Duluth.
“When they waste energy flying away from people, which happens a lot, it’s a problem because they're using energy to do that.”
And the owls are already stressed and hungry, Nicoletti explained. He said people should stay at least 50 feet away so as not to spook them. Crowds of people can also interfere with the owls’ ability to hunt.
Rice said people should get excited when they see these owls.
“I literally, I’m telling you, I screamed the first time I saw a great gray owl when driving,” Rice said. “But to turn around and drive right up to it, to get out of your car, that’s where I personally feel like we’re being disrespectful. We can appreciate them, but just give them the respect that they deserve.”
