For nearly a week, I had been skunked. Each day was basically the same as I woke well before sunrise, crawled into base layers and snow pants and synthetic down jackets. I loaded fifty pounds of camera equipment into my vehicle along with snowshoes, hiking poles, and safety gear. Temperatures in the pre-dawn darkness locked the world of Northern Minnesota in various layers of ice. The mercury dipped below negative twenty degrees Fahrenheit (negative twenty-eight Celsius) in the mornings. And each day I threaded my way through some of the best winter great gray owl habitat in the United States, from dawn till dusk, with nothing to show for it.

Locked in four-wheel drive, I plowed first tracks down snow covered back roads. I trudged through dense tangles of black spruce on snowshoes to the edge of sweeping muskegs where I studied every square inch of tree line and broken snag through my field glasses. I reviewed topographical maps, poured over my old notes from winters past, cold called local guides and field researchers. All to no avail.

I don’t give up easily. Especially when I’ve invested so much time and money and effort like this. Psychologists call it sunk-cost-fallacy:

“the phenomenon where a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it’s clear that abandonment would be more beneficial.”

But sometimes we must simply accept defeat and move on. There are an infinite number of variables out there when it comes to wildlife photography. Some we know. Some we can calculate and predict. Others, we have no idea even exist. And when day after day rolls past and the hotel bill keeps growing and you find yourself spending the better part of the day considering what new bar, brewery, or distillery in town you’re going to explore that night, you know it’s time to throw in the towel and call it quits.

After six days of nothing, I had finally resolved myself to do just that. Move on. Pack up. Roll out of town.

Driving back into the city of Duluth, Minnesota, I saddled up to the bar of that fine dining establishment known as Buffalo Wild Wings, ordered Bulliet Rye on the rocks, and pulled out my phone to begin planning my exit strategy for the morning. First things first: the weather forecast.

My jaw dropped.

In three days, a massive snowstorm was forecasted for the area. The report was for a foot and a half of snow in Duluth. To the north and west, where I was searching for owls, the forecast was for up to three feet of snow over a forty-eight-hour window.

This changed everything. As slow as it had been, as much time and money as I had shelled out over the week, a snowstorm of this magnitude was exactly what I needed to turn things around.

Great gray owls, like most northern owls, are nomadic in the winter. Irruptions aside, those regularly scheduled mass exoduses of birds spiling south in response to prey populations, the Ojibwe know these birds as Wa-Sha-Quon-Asin – he who wanders by night. They were named such due to their tendency to stick around in one place for only a day or two. During nesting, these birds occupy a territory of about four-square miles. But come winter, it’s all about food – which can be trapped beneath feet of snow. From great gray to boreal to northern saw-whet owls (in the north), these silent raptors’ ability to hunt is dependent upon snow depth. For the great grays, anything more than two feet of pack means the birds can’t reach the voles who scurry about in the subnivean zone down below. When the snow gets too deep, owls move on in search of better hunting. Sometimes this is a mile or two away. Sometimes it’s a couple hundred.