Owl

We don’t have as many brushes with wildlife as you might expect here in the north. I’ve seen some wolves from a distance, bears, one moose, and dead caribou, but on Sunday I saw my first owl. I was on the phone with my folks when I saw a brown bird swoop past the warehouses in our front yard. I waved Nicole over. At first we thought it was a Peregrine falcon from the colouring of the wings.

I got bundled up and trudged outside through a foot of snow to get some pictures. As soon as I approached the edge of blueberry hill, I saw the bird take off for the beach. I slowly pursued it but it flew about a kilometers down the beach and perched on a log.

When I got back to the house and downloaded the first pictures, they were blurry at best, but when I zoomed in on pictures of the bird perched on a log, I noticed that it had the shape of a owl.

In the afternoon it returned, so I headed out again and this time the pictures were much better. It was, as I had suspected, an owl.