"Ghosts Of The Forest": The Elusive Great Gray Owl

Alarm went off at 4 a.m. this morning, but you got to get up early to find a great gray. Yeah, I've never not wanted to get up to find a great gray. Love hearing those woodpeckers hammering and the doves calling. It's just sound of springtime out in the forest. It's awesome. Ken Schultz is on a quest. Today he returns to a place he has been coming week after week, month after month, year after year. He's on a search to find one of the most elusive birds in America, the great gray owl. Ken knows that there are at least a couple owls here. As an amateur wildlife photographer, he's taken some amazing shots of them before. I think these birds are made of half magic and half mystery. They can disappear into a forest like they were made of smoke. I've seen these birds fly into stuff that I couldn't walk through. In seconds, they're just gone. You know, you can't follow them for for 10 yards. They're just gone. The great gray owls have been called the ghosts of the forest and their scientific name, Strix nebulosa, comes from the Latin meaning misty, foggy, or obscure. Seeing one is incredibly rare. There are only about a thousand gray owls in Oregon. After five years of searching, Ken has probably seen less than a dozen and discovered only one nest. Today, he's hoping his persistence might pay off. It's a big bird, but it's a much bigger forest. It's hard. This is where we just kind of, like an owl divining rod. I think this way. Let's check the big meadow first. Is what the the male call will be like. So keep your ears open for that. It's been a few hours and so far no owls and no signs of a nest. Finding great gray owls requires intense focus. So part of the trick is to train your brain to not see the tree. You're looking for everything that's not tree. We're looking for, you know, any little movement if he's turning in there and looking for those silhouettes. There it is. We got him. Do you see it? It's not sure which tree it went into. There it is. We got a great gray owl, my friends. It's amazing how much they look like the tree. Look at him. When you find one, every single time for me, it's just like, ah. Through his photography, he's been able to watch the great grays in the wild like few people ever have. In doing so, he's learned a lot about these majestic owls. The great gray owl is the tallest owl in North America. So it stands about 30 inches tall. Even though it's huge, about a five-foot wingspan, it only weighs two and a half pounds. So it allows it to fly really, really slow, like almost like a hovercraft as it floats and then plunges out of the sky onto its prey. The great gray is phenomenal in how it hears its prey. Its face is shaped like a radar dish for the purpose of collecting sound and bringing it to its ears, which are actually asymmetrically located in its head. And that's so that the sound waves arrive at slightly different times to each ear, which allows it to triangulate with absolutely extraordinary accuracy. As you watch them, you see that head, you know, swiveling and like a radar dish and locking on as they zero in on a sound in the grass. I've seen them fly 30, 40 yards and drop onto a vole and hit it from hearing it 30 to 40 yards away. I've seen them do that when the vole was six inches, 12 inches under snow. I tend to like to keep my distance out of respect for the birds and wanting to see them acting naturally. I don't want to watch them reacting to me. I'm certainly not going to intervene in any way to try to get the owl to do something. What I'm trying to do is kind of, you know, capture the scene, like what was going on? What's the story? What is it like to be this owl? Over the past five years, he's taken some 20,000 photos of great grays. Now he's trying to take his photography a step further and to find art prints. Of course, he didn't pick an easy way. I've been experimenting with taking some of my absolute favorite images and doing some prints in this kind of old-school hand processed method from the late 1800s and working with a master in that process. I think I might be on to something. Ken has been circling the woods since sunrise and now it's getting late. He has found only one owl, but he still hasn't found any signs of a nest. He scans each nook and hollow of the trees. Not suitable. It doesn't look flat enough up there. Great grays, like other owls, don't build nests. So a nest doesn't really look like a nest. It might be the broken top of a tree. So it makes it that much harder to find one. Finding a nest is the only way to see a mother interacting with her young and a chance to photograph what very, very few people have ever seen. Ken is about to lose light for shooting and it's looking like he's gonna have to accept another day searching in vain. But then something in the treetop catches his attention. Man, there's a nest up there about 50 feet up. That's typical for a great gray owl nest. We got to try and get an angle to be able to see that. Oh my god. Wow. She's in the nest. Oh man, finally. Oh my god. Wow, you can just see the top of her head popping up over the edge of the nest. Last year I walked in four feet of snow in this forest in snowshoes for months. A hundred miles, 200 hours, you know, just ludicrous amount of time and never found the nest. And I knew it was, it had to be here somewhere. It had to, you know. And to finally see in that moment she's on a nest. This is, now I have this obligation. Like I know where these guys live. They're very sensitive. There are very few of them. It's a responsibility to protect them. Ken will continue to share his love of great gray owls through his photography, but their location he'll keep is their secret. The moon is up. Time for Ken to go home and for the great gray owls to reclaim the night.