A few birds from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
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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. . . . .  |
