Search for owls under a night of clarity

The night sky made the two-hour drive worthwhile. Based on records from many, many years past, I would have been to Cameron Pass three or four times before I finally got there this year. As February wanes, boreal owls become vocal and give voice to the high mountain forests.

A busy schedule kept me from my 38-year routine-turned-tradition of going afield to confirm boreal owls still inhabit that forest expanse accented by quaking aspen groves.

As the spinning Earth made the Sun appear to slide behind the far horizon, the snow-covered mountain slopes above treeline glowed as if the snow were golden yellow rather than white. And one by one stars rapidly awoke to the growing darkness.

Once nighttime took full charge of the sky, I realized I had not seen such celestial clarity in many years. No clouds of any kind. No glow of the Moon. No collective light of urban or suburban communities. Just a nearly black sky accented by uncountable numbers of stars.

At each of my 18 three-minute stops, I exerted disciplined multitasking by listening for boreal owls calling to proclaim their territories while I examined the sky star by star.

Soon enough, another aspect of that multitasking became apparent to me. Though I stood in place, my mind went walking along my personal memory lane.

I remembered the first owls I ever saw and the first owls I ever heard. Then, species by species, I remembered the first encounter I had with each owl species I have found. From there I began remembering special encounters with owls. Less than halfway through my usual three-hour search, my mind awakened to a fourth aspect of that multitasking.

Boreal owls motivated me, convinced me, to learn about things that had never interested me. Pursuing those things opened my mind to other things in a classical ripple effect.

Where, I wanted to know, did the name “boreal” come from? What does it mean and what does it have to do with a small owl?

In ancient Greek mythology Boreas was the god of the north wind, and so things associated with aspects of the north became described as being “boreal.”

About two millenniums later, a German known as Alexander von Humboldt explained how going up in elevation affects the distribution of plants and animals in a manner similar to going north in latitude from the equator.

In the same century a man named Clinton Hart Merriam defined the concept of life zones and named them. His work explained how wildlife of northern latitudes could live so far south.

Pursuing the details of that concept, I learned that boreal owls eat mostly redback-voles, that redbackvoles eat the mushrooms of certain fungi, that those fungi live in the roots of spruce trees. Since spruce trees dominate the boreal as well as the high-elevation southern forests, boreal owls live in both places.

And so my night progressed as if each star in that clear, dark sky were a memory not just of owls but of striving to comprehend the intricacies of Life’s connectedness and the history of how people have steadily learned about that connectedness, what we call “ecology.”

By the end of stop 18 I had heard three boreal owls and one northern sawwhet owl, all while walking through two and a half millenniums of Human awakening to the magnificence of Life on Earth.

I can’t wait for my next night out with the owls!