The Snowy Day

I have a seriously soft spot for Native Canadian and Inuit art. On my fortieth birthday, Kelly gave me a carving of a polar bear by Cape Dorset carver Tim Pee; we have several carvings and a basket from the Coast Salish tradition, dolls from Innu communities in Labrador, Cree beadwork from Alberta, and a beautiful and complex collage/painting by Ojibwe artist Teresa Altiman. And hanging in our bedroom is an inexpensive reproduction of a print by Cape Dorset artist Nikotai Mills, Birdsong, a rather sly rendering of a Snowy Owl playing an accordion.

I'd give my eye-teeth to own an actual Cape Dorset print rather than a reproduction, but that dream is still a long way off. This week, though, we had a small reason for celebration and marked it with this carving of an eagle by Kakee Peter, also from Cape Dorset.

It took us a long time to make our choice, and we were helped in our efforts by the very patient and knowledgeable Inuit woman who curates the Inuit and Native gallery of the Ontario Craft Council's Guild Shop. We spent a lot of time looking at a number of owl sculptures by Joanasie Manning (beyond our price range!) and others, and this got us to talking about the large number of snowy owls that are showing up in Southern climes this winter. (This video from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology explains some of that story.)

The curator related that this past year was a big for lemmings up North, and with the abundance of food, there was a marked rise in both fox and snowy owl populations. But with the lemmings now all gone, there are more owls than food and so perhaps this explains the great trip south. I mentioned that a snowy owl had been seen on the Leslie Street Spit this past week and that we might go look for it on the weekend. We paid for our purchase and as we left, she said, "Keep your eye on that snowy owl."

Saturday came, cold and wet. Fortified with eggs and toast, we packed up the binoculars, camera, and Peterson's, and after a 15 minute streetcar ride and about the same length of walk, found ourselves at the Spit. It was declared "an important bird area" of global significance in 2001 because of its significant concentrations of ring-billed gulls, black-crowned night herons and common terns, and its status as a landing point for large numbers of songbirds on the migratory path.  Right in the middle of Toronto!

I didn't know where exactly the owl had been sighted, so pretty much immediately decided not to get my hopes up and said that I would be happy with whatever we saw. Walking along the shore of the lake and then a more protected inlet, we kept our eyes open for a large, still white thing and saw the usual mix of long-tailed ducks, buffleheads, red-breasted mergansers, mute swans, mallards, and greater scaups. The slushy rain had pretty much soaked though our jackets by the time we made a final pass near the first two wetland cells in the middle of the Spit.

There on the pond was a large group of pointy-beaked waterfowl. My bins were pretty fogged up and the curtain of drizzle made it hard to see clearly, so I grabbed the long long lens for a picture that we could use to complete the ID at home, with hot tea.  Setting up the shot, I noticed  out of the corner of my eye a bunch of gulls on a small island and thought, "I must take a quick look at those before we leave."  Snap. Snap. Snap. Soggy, cold, and anticipating a warming stop at Starbucks on the way home, I forgot the gulls and started to pack up.

Then I heard Kelly, calmly and quietly: "Sara, I think you should look over here."

"Over where?"

"Over here. There's an owl on the island."

Well, that is my memory of it. Kelly remembers it more like this:

"OH-MY-GOD-SARA-COME-AND-LOOK-OVER-HERE-THERE'S-AN-OWL-ON-THE-ISLAND!!!"

Our first look at the snowy owl

The rest is a bit of a blur. It involved jumping up and down in a frozen bog, squealing, frantically updating facebook, and then rushing to get around the pond to a better view, all the while looking at each other with crazy grins.  It took us a little while to get the best view we could but there was no need to worry; the owl wasn't going anywhere.

Our photos aren't the best ... taken from far away with a 75-300 mm non-stabilized zoom by an excitable birdwatcher on a poorly lit, drizzly, blowy, snowy day, and then further zoomed and tweaked a bit at home.  They don't really capture what we saw, but I hope they give a sense of this bird's beauty and our sense of privilege at seeing it.

I stole the title for this blog from one of my favourite children's books, The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats. In it, a boy named Peter who lives in the big city goes outside to play in the snow, and brings a snowball home in his pocket. Ephemeral as snow is, it melts away in the night.

We caught a good long glimpse of this owl, but what we have of it is no more tangible than Peter's snowball. I hope that we, like Peter, will be wise enough to accept and enjoy the gifts that come to us when and how they do, and not fret at their impermanance.

Who knows what will happen to our owl and all the others that came South this year. I hope they make it home and raise a whole lot more of their kind.

After all, when Peter woke up, it had snowed again.