Allusive owl stops over at bird club

As the great gray owl scanned the room with her intense, round, yellow eyes, the crowd at Palmer Public Library stared back with equally wide eyes.

"Beautiful," came a hushed comment from the audience.

With the wild owl clutching her leather-clad arm with sharp talons, Kristen Guinn of the Bird Treatment and Learning Center described how the bird came to live with her, what it eats and how it lives.

The presentation was part of the Mat-Su Birders regular monthly meeting Wednesday night at the library and was a way to seek donations from club members and the public for Bird TLC, an Anchorage group that cares for injured and sick wild birds. For the bird watchers in the audience, it was a rare opportunity to see the raptor up close.

"It's one of those allusive owls, so many people don't get to see them," said Delesta Fox, vice president of the bird club.

While audience members passed around one of the owl's feathers and jars of her mouse-bone-filled, regurgitated pellets, Guinn discussed the life cycle and habits of owls in general and this one specifically.

The great gray owl came to Bird TLC after it was hit by a car near Talkeetna in February. The bird's wing and tailbone were broken, and her feet and beak were scuffed up.

Less than a year later, the bird is alive and healthy but will never fully recover. The wing injury proved to be permanent and so, unlike most of the birds that come through Bird TLC, she will not be released back into the wild.

Instead, she has found a home and a new life with Guinn and Bird TLC. The owl lives at Guinn's house in an outdoor mew -- a wooden bird enclosure with perches -- and travels with Guinn to various educational presentations such as the one at the library.

"She's relatively new at this," Guinn said of the owl's public appearances. Other wild birds often take years to get comfortable with people, but the great gray seemed unruffled by the attention. Volunteers at the center believe part of the wild bird's relative calm is due to the fact that she was probably less than two years old when she was injured and because she is an owl, known to be more docile than some raptors.

Despite this, Guinn emphasized the owl is very much a wild bird. She described how the owl "jumped" her one evening after neighbors had been harassing it. The sharp talons left numerous scratches and a deep gash beneath Guinn's eye. Now she always wears glasses to protect her eyes when handling the bird.

With a nearly 5-foot wing span, an impressive beak and long talons, the bird is remarkably intimidating for weighing just 3-and-a-half pounds. Great grays are the tallest, although not largest, of all the owls in Alaska.

Great gray owls, Guinn explained, can hear a mouse a football field away and will dive a foot into snow to retrieve it. They will eat rabbits, ptarmigan, ducks and squirrels, but seem to prefer smaller prey such as mice and voles.

Great gray owls are found from the Brooks Range down to Cook Inlet, as well as in Canada and parts of the northern Lower 48, but are not as frequently sighted as other types of owls. Because they hunt in fields, the birds are more common in the Mat-Su Valley than around Anchorage.

"They do the sit-and-wait kind of hunting," Guinn explained, describing how the owls spend the afternoons and early evenings in trees surrounding fields where they watch and listen for their meal.

Because of a unique frayed edge on their feathers, the owls are silent as they fly overhead. And when they swoop down on their prey, they attack with their talons.

"Their feet are their weapons," Guinn said.

This great gray owl has a tamer life than she did a year ago. She gets several already-dead mice each day to eat and is handled daily by Guinn to keep her accustomed to people.

In the wild, the owls generally only live for 13 years. In captivity, they've been known to live for 40 years and so, Guinn said, the two could have a long partnership ahead of them.