Lindsay photographer Hayley Rodman captured this close-up shot of a Great Grey Owl off of Highway 36 near Snug Harbour off Sturgeon Lake.
“I made my dad pull over on the side of the highway just to get this photo,” Hayley writes on her Instagram. “Very happy, I could have sat there with it the entire day if I could have. It just sat there looking around, I was a little scared it was going to fly at me so I made sure I obviously kept my distance but very happy I got this shot!”
Local naturalist Drew Monkman says this is the first sighting of the Great Grey Owl he’s heard about this winter in the Kawarthas.
One of the world’s largest owls, the Great Grey Owl is the only species of wood owls that is found in both the western and eastern hemispheres. They breed in North America from as far east as Quebec to the Pacific coast and Alaska.
Other than in California, Great Grey Owls are not an endangered species. The greatest environmental threat to the owls is the harvest of timber from their natural habitat in the boreal forest.
A non-migratory bird, the Great Grey Owl feeds almost exclusively on small rodents like voles and lemmings. They often hunt from a low listening post such as a stump, a low tree limb, a fence post, or a road sign.
Great Grey Owls have excellent hearing; their large facial disks known as “ruffs” help focus sound. In the winter, they use their superb hearing to locate prey moving in tunnels beneath 60 cm (2 feet) of snow.
Once they’ve honed in on their prey, they then crash through the snow to capture the prey — they are the only wood owl species known to use this hunting technique, called “snow plunging”.
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