The arctic breath of Boreas, the God of Winter, sweeps in on a frozen wind. It hangs in the air like crystals from the Great White North. Jagged ice floes creak and groan their way onto Gurnet Road, pushing up and over the street from all sides, making it nearly impassable. This “road” is the only traverse along Duxbury Beach, Massachusetts. The sands of this peninsula (a narrow 10-kilometre-long barrier beach southeast of Boston), are nowhere in sight - buried under the two metres of snow that have fallen in January.
More ice and snow obscure the entrance to the Powder Point (or Gurnet Bridge), which goes crosses Duxbury Bay and leads to the beach. The 1892 bridge is a teeth-rattling washboard as we bump across it in Norman Smith’s truck, then crunch-slide down Gurnet Road.
“Who in his or her right mind would be out here on a day like this?” asks Smith biologist and director of the Blue Hills Trailside Museum in nearby Milton, Mass.
The answer to Smith’s question lies in a creature as white and silent as freshly fallen snow. Smith is on a mission. His companion in the truck is a huge, beautiful snowy owl, one he will soon return to the wild along Duxbury Beach’s iceberg-lined shores.
Earlier in the day, Smith captured the male owl at Boston’s Logan Airport. Owls are caught with a bow trap—a spring-loaded, hoop net that holds a live pigeon, starling or mouse whose movements attract the owl. “The trap is sprung with a hand-held trip wire and causes no injury to the owl,” explains Smith,
After an owl is eased from under the net, Smith would carefully weigh, measures, and check its overall condition. He then places a metal band on one of its legs. The band is numbered and issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. If the owl is recaptured, or found dead, the band will provide information on its movements.
The Sorcerers of Winter
Snowy owls, Bubo scandiacus, are very large owls in the “typical owl” family Strigidae. They are the biggest owls in North America, and are also known as arctic owls or great white owls., and harfangs, the latter from The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. L ewis. Harfang was the castle of the Gentle Giants, close to the northernmost border of the Wild Lands of the North. It was a remnant of the long-gone Giant Empire.
“From ancient myth to Harry Potter,” writes Frances Backhouse in The Owls of North America, “owls hold an enduring place in the human imagination. In some cultures they are revered, in others, feared.” The scientific nomenclature of owls reflects historical European connections between owls and sorcery. The Greek word for witch, strix, is used to name one genus, and its Latin derivative, striga, is found in the order Strigiformes, to which all owls belong.
The oldest known depictions of owls are in cave paintings in southern France’s Chauvet cave, painted as rock art on the walls some 30,000 years ago. In the Trois Freres cave, also in southern France, the outline of a pair of snowy owls and their young reflects a time 15,000 years ago when the birds nested much farther south than they do now.
During the last glacial period, a central European subspecies of snowy owl, Bubo scandiacus gallicus, existed. No subspecies exist today. Until 2002, the snowy owl was thought to be the only member of a distinct genus, Nyctea, but DNA data show that it is closely related to great horned owls, also in the genus Bubo.
With its one-metre height and two-metre wingspan, yellow eyes and white feathers, snowy owls are easily identified. Adult males are pure white but females have dark barring, while young owls are heavily spotted.
Snowy owls nest on the vast, open tundra of the Arctic. With their thick plumage and heavily-feathered talons, the owls are well-adapted for life north of the Arctic Circle. When their prey (lemmings and other small mammals), go underground in harsh autumn and winter weather, the owls fly south, settling “in any place that looks like home until spring,” says Smith.
Report by Cheryl Lyn Dybas Photgraphs by Steve De Neef. (see OG Issue 32)
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