She sat and watched me across the barren sandy plain with silent indifferent eyes, as though I were a piece of driftwood. A flock of winter dunlins swept and crisscrossed the marsh behind her, emphasizing her immobility. She was a large bird, more gray than white at a distance, and highly marked – the signs of a female. Her breast was flecked with lateral black markings like those of a great horned owl, and the wing and back feathers were also tipped in black. The head markings started in a widow’s peak, then carried back around and down like sideburns over the ear openings. The male, by contrast, is usually smaller and much less marked, often nearly pure white.
This was the first time I had ever seen a snowy owl in the wild and all these details and comparisons did not surface in my mind until much later. At the time I was only aware of watching, and being watched by, one of the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen.
Seeing a snowy on Cape Cod is largely a matter of being in the right place at the right time. These occasional arctic visitors to the Cape’s winter beaches are not that uncommon, but their appearances vary greatly from year to year. During so-called ‘flight years,’ up to fifty or more of these great white birds, largest of all our North American owls, have been reported here.
Ornithologists still debate over the precise causes of these en masse southern migrations, which seem to occur roughly every five years. Still, they appear to be definitely linked with the cyclical abundance of the owls’ arctic prey, mainly lemmings and northern hares. An exceptionally snowy winter on their home grounds might also make the rodent food supply less available and thus drive some of the population south. I don’t believe that this winter was a flight year, at least not here; but even in off years one or two of these birds can be expected somewhere along our outer shores.
Over Christmas week a snowy had been reported on Nauset Beach a couple of miles north of the Orleans parking lot. One morning after New Year’s I drove down to have a look. It was a semi-raw day, overcast, with the wind north-northeast and cold when you headed into it. The ocean had a magnificent, bruised look about it, and pawed at the upper beach with dark, polished claws.
I took the landward route north, walking inside the wall of low dunes up toward the inlet. I saw where a recent northeaster had washed over their crest and spilled considerable beach sand down their backsides, burying the beach grass and then crusting over in the cold, so that the sand continually broke through as I walked over it, as salt ice will on a frozen marsh.
There was not much to be seen on the way out, and I knew that my expectations were based a great deal on faith. With its keen hearing and daytime vision, the owl might easily spot me and slip away long before I saw it. There was also no guarantee it would be on the Orleans spit in the first place. It might have flown across the inlet to Coast Guard Beach, or out to New Island, created a few winters ago when the ocean made a new inlet into Nauset Harbor and sheared off the southern end of the Eastham spit. It might even be gone completely, or have been shot – though it is now a protected species.
I remembered reading that during the great flight year of 1946 - 27 over 2300 snowy owls were shot and kept as trophies in the United States alone. One of the greatest difficulties for modern conservationists, I think, is to rightly conceive how much we have lost. We trudge so far today to see so little, that the result is often a strangely pathetic elation.
When I came to where the dunes tapered down and ended, the beach spread out into a large, wide, bare plain separating ocean and marsh. Here in summer is a large least tern colony, the area posted and protected from human interference. One owl could wreak unbelievable damage on such a colony, but snowys almost always leave for the north again by March. On this same plain in other winters I have sometimes surprised a flock of a thousand gulls, standing in solemn congregation, and have run among them like a banshee, turning the air into a gray and white screaming turbulence. But today there was nothing, only an empty vastness and a darkening sky.
I stood atop the last dune, where I had an unobstructed view of the sands as far north as the inlet, and looked through my glasses for several minutes. Nothing. My ears began to grow cold and my hopes flagged. I was about to leave and scanned the barren plain one last time. By chance I noticed near a slight rise a light gray post the top of which suddenly cocked over. It was the owl, slouched against a lump of sand with a tuft of grass growing on its top, about two hundred yards off on the inlet side. I walked obliquely but openly northeast across the plain toward the ocean side until I was slightly north of the bird, some hundred yards away, forcing it to look into the wind at me. Then I sat down and looked at the owl carefully through field glasses for the first time.
The owl indolently turned her head from side to side and then deliberately rested her gaze on me. She stared down the barrels of my binoculars with heavily-lidded yellow eyes. The masked face resembled that of a hockey goalie, a ritual mask of hidden strength and violence.
The snowy owl’s peculiarly lidded eyes – ‘bedroom eyes,’ my father calls them – give it a sleepy, dreamy aspect, causing most people who see one for the first time to assume that it is sick or exhausted. It also has a peculiar stance. Unlike most owls, a snowy tends not to perch upright, but leans or slouches over against the ground, almost touching its breast. It will sometimes fish along a stream, lying at full length on its side beside the bank, utterly motionless until a fish swims by and a hidden talon darts out with lightning speed. When at rest everything about the snowy owl suggests sloth and unawareness; it is a beautiful ruse.
On their breeding grounds in the far north these snowy owls are said to possess a formidable and somewhat eerie repertoire of hoots, grunts and barks. But like wise men in strange lands they keep silent during their erratic southern migrations.
In their normal range these birds are not exclusively coastal residents, but it was suddenly clear to me why, when they visit the Cape, they prefer our outer beaches to our woodlands. Here everything conspired to remind her of her northern home. The small sand hummock, in the lee of which she now rested, was a sandy reproduction of the frost-heaved rises, called pingaluks, which dot her native tundra. On these pingaluks the owls nest and scan the moss- and lichen-covered terrain for prey. New Island, out in the inlet, was said to have a healthy population of voles, a highly acceptable substitute for arctic lemmings in her diet.
Geese and ducks fed in the water of the marshes beyond her, as they do in the summer-thawed lakes and swamps of the arctic. Earlier that week a friend of mine had watched the owl rip apart the carcass of a Canada goose with her powerful talons and beak on the banks of the island. She had probably found the goose dead, although these four-pound predators have been known to kill, and even fly off with, full-grown geese twice their own weight.
Under her unyielding gaze the plain was transformed into a frozen northern tundra, the sand into windswept snow. The parking lot twenty minutes to the south withdrew a thousand miles away, and I, not the owl, became the intruder and temporary visitor.
Keeping my binoculars trained on her, I began to inch slowly toward her on my seat, hoping that this unconventional or low-profile approach might distract her. If this sounds like a stupid ploy, it probably was; but I had seen it work with other birds. At any rate, the owl let me play my game for only about thirty feet and then lifted into the air on great, white, creamy wings, drifting swiftly and effortlessly south for a hundred yards, where she came to rest on an old beached timber.
This time I crawled toward her on my stomach, hoping to keep below her line of sight. But she soon rose and again sailed south, this time slipping down behind the low dune from which I had first spotted her.
Obviously she was not interested in escaping me, which she could have done easily by flying across the inlet. It seemed I was merely disturbing some comfortable psychological distance within which she would not tolerate me – about two hundred and fifty feet, it seemed. I wondered if this distance might bear some relationship to the effective and hereditary range of an Eskimo arrow.
This time, however, the dune that hid us from each other was high enough so that I might approach her unseen. I headed swiftly toward it, wondering if her keen ears would pick up my footsteps on the hardened sand; but no owl rose. Finally I reached the dune, crawled carefully up its side, peered through the grass on its ridge and saw – nothing. The owl was gone. It was as though the dune were a magician’s cloak that had been spread momentarily over a beautiful woman, and then had been withdrawn to reveal her vanished!
I was certain I had been outfoxed – or outowled; that the bird had slipped away between the dunes, skimming low and unseen out over the sands and down the beach as marsh hawks will do. And then I realized that I was watching a remarkable piece of avian camouflage.
Behind the dune and parallel to the beach was a row of upended wooden pallets placed in the sand as windbreaks for many rows of nearly buried but still visible beach grass plantings. On the top of one of these pallets, perched so that her darker, gray-streaked sides lined up with two of the vertical, wind-bleached boards, sat the owl. At first glance she had looked exactly like an extension of the pallet.
Had the ploy been intentional? I was ready to believe it. But I did not have time to ponder the question. As soon as I realized what it was I was looking at and established eye contact with the owl, she once again lifted into the air with no visible effort. This time she passed deliberately and directly over me, heading with slow, deep wingbeats into the wind. As she passed not thirty feet above my head, I had a glimpse of sheer, cool competence sailing by on pure milk-white wings nearly five feet across. The yellow eyes peered down at me as though I might be a mouse or a lemming, and I was very glad I wasn’t.
The owl continued north nearly two hundred yards, then stooped and went into a long low sweet glide that gradually slowed to a halt. Stretching out her talons before her, she came to rest in the precise spot by the low hummock where I had first spotted her a half-hour before. Again she turned her head casually and looked at me with faintly contemptuous indifference, as much as to say, ‘Well, we can play this game all day, if you care to.’
But I had taken up enough of her time. Somehow I had the feeling that I had not seen a snowy owl so much as been seen by one. Certain encounters always turn out that way, whatever the intention. It seems a matter of character. I turned and headed south, back to the car, leaving her to her undisturbed and unchallenged isolation.