[组图]乌林鸮 Great Grey Owl 大灰猫头鹰

乌林鸮 Great Grey Owl ，直译成大灰猫头鹰也不错。

一张精美的摄影：

由这张图，继续介绍Great Grey Owl ：【作者】carlos

Great Gray Owls 大灰猫头鹰

Winged lords of northern forests, the big raptors fly noiselessly, hunt in light and dark, and can hear a field mouse stir under the snow.

北部的森林的空中统治者，无声飞行的大型猛禽，白天黑夜都可觅食，还可以听到大雪下一个田鼠的些许动静。

潜入雪地找食 Diving for Dinner

Even when deep snow conceals the rodents they depend on for food, great gray owls, like this one in Manitoba, keep themselves well fed. Their hearing is so acute that they can hear the squeaks and scrabbles of their prey under a foot of snow, and they're strong enough to plunge through snow crust so thick that a grown person could walk on it without breaking through.

听消息 Listening Post

From a treetop perch in Montana, a great gray owl listens for prey. Though their vision is good, hearing is an even more valuable tool for these forest hunters.

无声的武器 Quiet Power

Gilded by low-hanging winter sun, a great gray owl skims through a Manitoba forest clearing. With feathers built to muffle the noise of air flowing over their wings, great grays are better able to hear their prey as they fly in for a kill—while offering no audible warning of their approach. "A big owl flew not three feet (one meter) over my head," photographer Dan Cox recalls. "It was absolutely silent. Those big flapping wings made no noise at all."

妈妈翅膀下的安全 Safe Under Mother's Wings

When she has eggs or chicks to care for, a great gray female like this one in Montana rarely ventures far from the nest. Canadian biologist Jim Duncan has discovered that females sometimes lose a third of their body weight in as little as a month, going without food so more can go to their young. Male owls also make sacrifices for their young. Duncan saw the strain of parenting in an adult male he observed at the end of a summer devoted to raising five chicks. With worn-out plumage, "he looked like a spent salmon," says Duncan.

The Great Gray Food Groups: Rodents, Rodents, and More Rodents
大灰猫头鹰的菜单：啮齿动物，啮齿动物，以及更多的啮齿动物

Great gray owls in the lower 48, like this mother and chicks in Montana, dine on gophers, voles, chipmunks, and just about any other kind of rodent they can get their talons on (above). By contrast, owl populations in Canada and Alaska depend almost exclusively on voles. But wherever they live, great grays consume prodigious quantities of prey. In winter, adults can gulp down as much as a third of their body weight in rodent meals daily.