Have you ever read and loved a book? And then it comes out as a motion picture…..and details are altered or an important character is not as you had pictured him or her?
That happened to me when I saw the Harry Potter movies. Hedwig---the carrier of messages and friend to the orphan wizard---was portrayed by a male Snowy Owl! What?
Snowy Owls are birds of the Artic tundra. Very occasionally, young owls show up in Great Britain, but almost every winter, a few of these stunning birds filter into the Great Lakes region.
In some years, quite a few show up here…. and in Minnesota where one of my favorite nature writers (and public radio personalities) Laura Erickson apparently shared my reaction and she did considerable research into the matter.
Erickson wrote,” You can tell that the owl playing Hedwig is really a male because his plumage is so white—female Snowy Owls have dark markings. Females are also bigger and heavier, and so would be a little harder for human actors to handle.
“Healthy males average about 4 pounds, females almost 4 1/2 pounds. They have powerful talons. You can’t see in the film that Daniel Radcliffe is wearing thick leather protection on his arm. Claws that can kill a large duck through thick feathers can be pretty hard on human arms, too, even when the owl is just trying to balance itself.”
Every winter….every time I go out into the countryside, I scan the snowy fields, checking the ground and low fenceposts and highway signs. It’s not easy to spot a white owl in an all white landscape, but when I do, it’s nothing short of magical.
