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Boreal Owl

:
Boreal Owl
Takvialnguaraq

The Boreal owl is just about the tamest large bird in Alaska. Many years ago near Scammon Bay I skied so close to one I could probably have put my hands around him and taken him home. I didn't, but got some good close-up photos instead. Two other similar experiences in the Delta convinced me this owl was either fearless or blind to my approach in the bright sunlight. Or both. In fact, the Yupik name Takvialnguaraq means "one with poor eyesight." It has two other Yupik names that I know of, "qaku'urtaruaq," and "qaku'urtayaraq," both of which refer to its rapid nocturnal "nagging" call.

I remember one early March in Russian Mission ten years ago while skiing at night with a friend in the slough, we heard two of these owls bantering back and forth. The owls were obviously in love, and what was certainly their courting call didn't sound anything like "nagging" at all. In fact, it was more like a rapid series of low, whistled toots: phoo phoo phoo phoo phoo phoo phoo phoo phoo. I was so touched by what I heard that I wrote a poem about it the same night. I'll include the poem at the end of the story. Meanwhile here are some facts about Takvialnguaraq.

The scientific name for this friendly little owl is Aegolius funereus. Aegolius is Greek for a kind of owl, and funereus means "funereal" in Latin, referring to one of its calls which must have reminded Europeans of "wailing for the dead." Its common name, boreal, alludes to its northern range, usually in coniferous forests around the world.

As with most owls, the Boreal owl eats voles, small birds and large insects, which they capture with their dagger-like talons. They also have unique wing feathers that allow them to sneak up on their prey with lethal silence. Take a close look at their first primary (flight) feathers, and you'll see they have a soft, saw-toothed leading edge that reduces the vortex noise of the air passing over the wings. This makes them one of the most efficient nocturnal hunters in the forest.

Sometime between April and June, depending on the weather, the female lays 3-10 pure white eggs in a tree cavity, usually a large abandoned woodpecker hole. She alone incubates these eggs. Within a month they hatch, and in another month the fuzzy sooty-brown colored young launch themselves for the first time into a world filled with predators, such as Goshawks and Great-horned owls, which take a large toll of these little guys. Since they don't migrate, winter also claims many of them. If they're lucky, though, they might live to the ripe old age of 15 or 16.

Now for the poem

It was ten below, and
a million emerald
stars
blinked
high and poignant
in the raven dark dome above us,
as we skied out from Russian Mission

hoping for another sky show like the night before,
of blood-splashed auroral curtains and
amorphous sheets of
flashing white light .
suddenly
transmuted to serpents
undulating blue in an ocean cosmos ....

we glided across brittle February snow
on an ancient Yukon lake
slashed out of the Mission hills
a million years ago
by Yukon River floods
reticent now
in the quiet of winter stars. . . .
sky crystals scintillating
and
probing
our consciousness. . . .

we stopped and listened
to the sounds of the dark,
hoping
for the visual crash of northern lights.. . . .

it was then we heard them,
Boreal owls,
winnowing like snipes in May,
back and forth,
in the tall shadows of spruce
standing sentinel against the black roof of night,
we scanned long and deep
searching the silhouette fronds on the hill above,
but we couldn't find them with our eyes,
only our ears heard
and followed
every lilted note of their quavering boreal voice
so sweet at this time of year,
a song of promise of warm winds coming,
of spring in the still frigid air.. . .

Scott and I whispered
of these songs of the equinox,
these musical feasts, and
as we listened
we wanted to edge just a little closer
to those fuzzy feathers,
knowing if we did
we might break the spell,
maybe lose the music .....

we wondered what they were singing about,
those two,
as they might be wondering about us

standing there on sticks
under the dippers
and the polar star,
growing colder,
finally gliding on to leave them in their solitude of
forest shadows
and cold white silence. . . . .
Boreal Owl

» List of Yupik Birds

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