The Winter Nest

The sun set 10 minutes ago on the shortest day of the year. My fingers are numb and I can see my breath as I stand in a Minnesota woodlot and listen for the first sign of spring. At first there’s only frigid silence; then I hear it. The call is soft and low in pitch, but it carries a long distance, like the rumble of faraway thunder. It’s a short melody of six notes: whoo…whoo-whoo-whoo…whoo-whoo—the iconic hooting of a male great horned owl.

A half minute later, the silence is broken again by a series of noticeably higher hoots. The female owl has answered. For the next 30 minutes, I listen to the back-and-forth mating duet of this pair. Spring is on its way. Awesome.

Owls have fascinated us forever. They have a unique charisma, evoking a sense of mystery thanks to their humanlike eyes, stealthy flight, and preference for the night. Perhaps you have a favorite owl. Mine is the great horned, an apex predator I’ve studied and photographed for decades.

Great horned owls are large, with a wingspan up to five feet. Their deep-yellow eyes, adapted for excellent vision on even the darkest nights, give them a fearsome look, as do the hornlike tufts of feathers on their head.

You can find this impressive owl in every Minnesota county. The bird prefers small woodlots with surrounding open fields, but it’s flexible. Great horned owls live in loud urban settings and in the deep wilderness. I’ve seen and heard them from Forestville State Park in the south to Seagull Lake in the north and everywhere in between.

For this collection of photos, I turned my lens on great horned owls in late winter and early spring—nesting time for the hardy birds. Like all owls, great horned owls do not build nests, but rather appropriate tree hollows or nests made by other creatures such as squirrels, crows, and even bald eagles. The female owl keeps the eggs at a steady 100 degrees for 30 days, despite snowstorms and minus 50-degree windchills. Great horned owlets arrive in late winter, which gives them plenty of time to learn to fly and hunt before the following cold season.