The Great Grey Owl (Strix nebulosa) is a giant of the taiga, 60–70 cm long with a wingspan of about 135–160 cm, though surprisingly light at just 0.8–1.7 kg since much of its apparent bulk is loose plumage. The grey body is marked with darker barring, and the most striking feature is the enormous, round facial disc patterned with concentric rings around a pair of small yellow eyes. A black "bow-tie" mark sits beneath the chin, and fine dark streaks running from the bill give the face a moustached impression.
The male's territorial call is a series of deep, soft, muffled hooting notes — a repeated "hoo-hoo-hoo" pitched so low it can be hard to detect, yet one that carries far through the forest on still spring nights. The species breeds in northern and central Sweden, and its numbers fluctuate strongly with the abundance of voles and lemmings, generally put at a few hundred to a couple of thousand pairs; it is red-listed as Near Threatened (NT) in Sweden, though considered Least Concern and possibly increasing globally, and in poor rodent years birds can irrupt southward in unusually large numbers. It builds no nest of its own, instead taking over old stick nests abandoned by birds of prey, sometimes on broken tree stumps; the female lays 3–5 eggs, though clutch size is strongly governed by rodent abundance, and she defends the nest fiercely. The Great Grey Owl feeds almost exclusively on small rodents, chiefly voles and lemmings, using extraordinarily acute hearing to locate and strike prey moving beneath a thick blanket of snow, and it will readily hunt in broad daylight during the short northern summer nights.
Read about this species in Swedish →