“Sometimes there’s an owl, and sometimes there isn’t,” explains Pa in Jane Yolen’s beautiful book, Owl Moon. And what I want to add is: those “sometimes” are not of equal weight. It should read: very infrequently there is an owl, but every now and again when you are super lucky there is an owl. But that is too clunky and it’s important to keep hope, especially for children.

I am a person of hope, which means I spend a lot of time looking up pine trees for owls. I have been rewarded a few times, especially last January when I found a long-eared owl. But if I clocked the number of hours I look for owls, I would be embarrassed.

 

Come winter I start to hope for something really special, like a snowy owl, that gorgeous, large, white owl that brings news from the Arctic. My goal is to find one, but short of that, I was happy to go see one that had been posted to various bird sites for a few weeks now. It was hanging out near a reservoir on the New Jersey, Pennsylvania border. So on the day after Thanksgiving Peter and I decided to try and find this wintering bird.

MeadowlandsWe had spent Thanksgiving morning not helping with cooking the family feast, but rather birding in the Meadowlands. I’ve always been intrigued by the Meadowlands—a grassy, tidal area that I whiz past on the New Jersey Turnpike, usually rushing to Newark Airport. It doesn’t sound particularly appealing, with a capped dump nearby. But on a sunny, calm day, it was beautiful. In the distance we could see Manhattan, and in front of that the steady flow of traffic on the Turnpike. But what we focused on were a series of ducks: a black duck, a set of ruddy ducks with their erect little tails, buffleheads, with their dramatic black and white heads, and a duck with a black butt—a Gadwall. We then threw in our weight with the pumpkin pie (both making and eating).

Black Friday, while some had already spent a few hours shopping, we were speeding toward Pennsylvania, passing right by the Merrill Creek Reservoir near Phillipsburg, New Jersey. No one had posted a sighting of the owl in the past few days so we headed out with scope, cameras and only a little bit of hope. The parking lot had a line up of cars; all were intent on seeing the owl.

The reservoir is a beautiful, vast lake, a few ring-billed gulls loitering overhead. A pair of bald eagles perched in a tree. We walked down a wide dirt path then along a breakwater. A jumble of scree lined the breakwater that held the water back. And somewhere in that scree sat an owl. In other words we were looking for white on light grey.

We passed a trio of birders heading home.

“See the owl?”
“No owl,” they reported. And I felt my heart sink.

But they had seen a red-necked grebe. My heart lifted a little.

There is a bird in there!The other birders scanned the scree in search of the bird. So did we. The slope was vast, tundra-like, exactly what this bird knew best. And then I put my binoculars to my eyes and there was a rock that moved. That had black spots. That was shaped like an owl. That was an owl. My hands shook in excitement.

A snowy owl hunts at dawn and dusk. And for the rest of the day it rests, in the sun. And that is what it did while we watched, and photographers took thousands of photos of every yawn and fluff. And it watched us as well. And then we left it to sleep, to carry on its Arctic dreams.

 

 

 

Photo by Peter Schoenberger