Great Gray Owl - Yosemite National Park

Every spring for many years I have taken a group of middle school kids to Yosemite National Park and the Yosemite Institute.  This outstanding outdoor-ed program has a long history of bringing young people face-to-face with the natural world and teaching them their role in protecting it.  The original campus of the program sits at about 6,000 feet on the edge of a meadow called Crane Flat.  Every year that I have gone I have spent considerable time canvasing the meadow and it's environs in the hope of seeing a Great Gray Owl.  There are several sights within the park where these owls come to nest each year and Crane Flat is one of them.  Their arrival however is highly dependent on the weather and snowpack conditions, both of which were just right during the first week of April 2009. As is my custom when staying at Crane Flat I was up early to get the coffee going and telling the site manager Kevin Sullivan about my long-running quest to see the Great Gray Owl here.  In Kevin I found a kindred spirit as he too was a birder and was as anxious as I to see this magnificent bird.  After getting one good cup of coffee down we were greeted by a YI staff maintenance guy who had just driven up from the valley with the news that two days prior a Great Grey was seen in Gas Station Meadow not far from Crane Flat and that he had looked for it on his way in without success.  I pulled on my jacket, grabbed my binoculars and was off to walk the 1/2 mile to where this bird might be.  Gas Station Meadow is called such because it happens to be directly across Highway 120 from the only gas station inside Yosemite National Park.  It is a very small "pocket" meadow that sits below the roadway and is tucked up against the steep embankment of the roadbed.  Since the embankment is the northern terminus of the meadow that edge gets more sun and melts out before the rest of the meadow area does leaving a significant strip of exposed ground when the rest of the meadow is still under snow.  It is this strip that seems to attract the owl, for as I crossed the roadway to look down into the meadow there he was perched on a snag right at the margin above the melt line.  Needless to say it was all I could do not to whoop out loud, after 15 years of trying, there he/she was.  I stayed only long enough to be convinced then I was on my way back to get Kevin.  When I arrived back another YI staffer had shown up and was eager to go right back but Kevin could not come with us as he had to be there for breakfast for all the kids (who I had deserted for the bird!) We went back and got a few photos and Kevin was able to see it a little later as it stayed put for the remainder of the day.  He was good enough to share all of his pictures and a short movie which appears below.  Who knows if I will ever see another one of these guys but either way the excitement of this day will always be with me.