Great Gray Owls Nesting in Fresno County, California

Forster described the specimens of birds, fishes, and mammals that Hudson's Bay Company naturalists had collected and sent to England on their summer 1771 trade ships (Houston et al. 2003).among them were five birds new to science.andrew Graham, the factor at Severn River, provided most of these, including a specimen and accompanying notes that enabled Forster (1772) to describe a "fine non-descript [i.e., undescribed] owl," which he named the Grey Owl, Strix nebulosa.The other four were the birds we now know as the Eskimo Curlew (Numenius borealis), Boreal Chickadee (Poecile hudsonicus), Blackpoll Warbler (Dendroica striata), and Whitecrowned Sparrow (Zonotrichia leucophrys). Status and DistributionTwo subspecies of the holarctic Great Gray Owl have long been recognized.Strix n. lapponica breeds across Eurasia from northern Scandinavia east through northern Siberia and south to central European Russia, northern Mongolia, northern Manchuria, amurland, and Sakhalin (Holt et al. 1999). in comparison to nebulosa it is slightly smaller in body mass and wing length, slightly paler, and more prominently streaked below (Bull and Duncan 1993).Nominate nebulosa breeds in North america from central alaska east through the boreal forest of Canada and south locally in the interior to the mountains of northcentral Washington, south-central Oregon, California to the southern Sierra Nevada, northern idaho, western Montana, western Wyoming, southwestern and central alberta, central Saskatchewan, southern Manitoba, northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, northern Michigan (casually), and south-central Ontario (aOu 1998).Great Gray Owls winter throughout their breeding range in North america, but birds of the central and eastern populations wander south casually as far as Nebraska, iowa, indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey (aOu 1998).The winter of 2004-05 produced the largest irruption on record.Thousands of birds appeared in Ontario, with 501 found and reported dead (Jones 2005).Daily counts of more than 100 birds were reported as routine in Minnesota in December and January (Granlund 2005). in comparison, fewer than 60 wandering birds were noted in any winter from 1890 through 1965, and the peak irruption reported by Bull and Duncan (1993), in 1991-92, was of fewer than 500 birds.Suggested causes for these southward wanderings include attempts to avoid deep snow cover and shortages of prey in the breeding range (Bull and Duncan 1993).Early California Records Newberry (1857) was the first to report the Great Gray Owl in California: "This large and handsome owl is generally disseminated over the western part of the North american continent, at least we obtained proofs of its existence in the Sacramento valley, in the Cascade mountains, in the Des Chutes basin, and on the Columbia, in Oregon."He didn't indicate the nature of these proofs.Baird et al. (1874) mentioned Newberry's report without comment and reported a June specimen from near the mouth of the Columbia River.apparently on the basis of only those two reports from Western Birds 39:110-116, 2008 1 Quady: Great Gray Owls Nesting in Fresno County, California

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