Superb Owl Sunday
Not quite so superb this year
(Listen to the radio version here.)
Every year since the late 90s or early 00s, long before it was trendy, I’ve gone out one Sunday every February looking for a Superb Owl on a day when other people are buying guacamole and preparing to watch a pigskin get kicked around. Russ and I had our most excellent experience ever with a Boreal Owl on Superb Owl Sunday in 2013. We ran into Jim Lind in Two Harbors, and as we chatted away, WHOA! There it was, astonishingly close, with the sun behind us.
The only reason we’d run into Jim was because he spotted us and came down to tell us about a Northern Saw-whet Owl a couple blocks away—a two-fer!
Over the years, we’ve seen lots of owls on Superb Owl Sunday—mostly Great Gray, Barred, and Northern Hawk Owls. The only year I was entirely skunked was 2017, when Lisa Johnson and I spent the whole day out searching, seeing plenty of other cool birds but not glimpsing a single owl. Well, the only year until 2024.
Russ and I are headed to Hawaii in two weeks. Normally we’d be on top of everything so that we could spend the entire Superb Owl Sunday in the bog, but this year, thanks to all my stupid medical issues, we’re way behind and could only afford enough time for a quick drive to Two Harbors and a couple of spots on the way home. Unlike the year Lisa and I got skunked, I can’t even say we gave it the old college try.
So far, 2024 is not my year for seeing owls. I did hear a Great Horned Owl calling near my bedroom window just after midnight on February 4, but only rarely do I find them like that, without even trying. More often, I luck into noticing songbirds mobbing one. The last time that happened was in September, when swearing crows and jays drew me into my backyard in time to see a Barred Owl in my boxelder.
A year before, in October 2022, swearing chickadees and nuthatches alerted me to a Saw-whet Owl hiding in the foliage of a tree behind my yard.
That was almost the exact same spot where, back in October 1990, long before I was photographing birds, crows pointed me to the only Long-eared Owl I’ve ever seen right here.
Paying attention to mobbing birds certainly helps, but to find most owls, we must get out there and search. The Sax-Zim Bog is the best place in the state to find owls—I’ve seen nine different species in the Bog since we moved here in 1981. The only time I went there so far this year, on January 3, Erik Bruhnke and I saw a Great Gray Owl.
I won’t have another chance to get to there before we leave for Hawaii February 26, but I’m hoping to see at least one owl in Hawaii. For some unknown reason, Short-eared Owls found their way, entirely on their own, to many isolated oceanic islands, including the Galápagos and to all the main islands of Hawaii, where they are called the Pueo. Russ and I saw one on Maui back in 2000, and this time around, knowing that my buddy and our tour guide, Erik Bruhnke, has such great owl karma, I hope to see and photograph at least one.
The Barn Owl can also be found on all the main Hawaiian islands, but unlike the Pueo, did not arrive on its own power. Between 1958 and 1963, the Hawai‘i Board of Agriculture and Forestry imported 86 Barn Owls onto the Big Island, Moloka‘i, O‘ahu, and Kaua‘i to control rats in cane fields, and the owls thrived. Unfortunately, they didn’t put a dent into rats population, and do prey, along with the rats, on native Hawaiian seabirds during their nesting season. Although the Barn Owl is more common now than the native Short-eared Owl, we’re much less likely to see one because the Barn Owl is nocturnal, hiding during daylight hours.
Oddly enough, the only Barn Owl I’ve ever seen in Minnesota, up at the Sax-Zim Bog in January 2020, was out in the daytime, but that poor doomed thing was far north of its range and desperate, dying later the same day that most of us birders saw it. Even if we don’t see one in Hawaii, we’ll at least be certain the Barn Owls there are well-fed.
Superb Owl Sunday this year left us well-fed, too—we lucked into discovering a Girl Scout cookie stand on North Shore Drive, and of course stopped to buy our year’s supply of Thin Mints. So the day wasn’t an entire bust.
When Russ and I come home March 12, with any luck there will be snow on the ground and at least some wintering owls still up at the bog. I’ll do my best to head there in hopes of seeing a Northern Hawk Owl. The bog and the Superior Airport are usually the best places to find a Snowy Owl, and I may still have a chance for that one, too. But even if I miss out on most of the northern owls this year, I’ve seen more than my share in the past, and there’s always next winter. If owls were easy to find, it wouldn’t be nearly as magical each time we see one.
