You were right, but don’t worry, you didn’t step into the Blair Witch Project. You were just in great grey owl habitat.

Meet your watcher: ruler of the boreal forest, bigger than any other owl in this country and basically one of the coolest birds in the world.

But that’s okay. Guess what a great grey can do? Move its head 270 degrees.

The owl is basically a cartoon character, but real.

And even though its eyes are huge and yellow, its cryptic colouring means that the great grey is perfectly camouflaged in its forest home.

Even when it’s flying, you’re probably not going to notice it. Which is crazy, given that a grey owl’s wingspan rivals a smallish bald eagle, which definitely makes noise when flying.

The difference?

Eagles have hard-edged feathers that, when they hit the air, make that loud flapping noise.

Great greys have feathers designed like a comb. And just as comb helps create perfectly coiffed hair, these feathers perfectly comb the air around the owl’s body, making it completely silent in flight.

Very cool, but not as cool as this:

Great grey ears are asymmetrical, which means, like Canadian federalism, it’s slightly different on each side.

The right ear opening is lower than on the left, which allows it to triangulate the exact location of prey it can’t see because, you know, it’s buried in metre high snow.

Helping these bizarre ears is a face shaped like a dish. But unlike a dish, a great greys’ face is designed to act as a satellite, filtering the slightest movement deep in the snow to those ears, giving the owl finely calibrated hunting coordinates.

The great grey? It’s had this technology built in since the last ice age. We clued in sometime around 1940.

The great grey is also smart – smart enough to never build its own nest, but borrow those that ravens build. And, as you know, ravens are about the smartest creature in the wild, so the owls just know they’re moving into a well-built home, often with a few fun features thrown in. Like cameras and jewelry!

Put this skillset together and you know when it dives, it’s coming back up with mice, voles, gophers, squirrels, weasels, muskrat… I mean, the great grey is a skilled assassin of animals large and small.

In fact, where many owls focus on specific prey, the great grey is a generalist who can shift habitat and prey to focus on the species most out of balance in the ecosystem.

And that’s why great grey owls are a keystone species – directly impacting every aspect of the food chain in a positive way.

So, they’re cool and important. And that’s why it’s great news they’re not endangered. Though they are susceptible to change and they are being killed all too frequently because of the poison we use to kill the things they were already going to kill for us.

But with 45% of the world’s population of great greys, if we just stop poisoning rodents, great greys will continue to do our hard work for us – for free – and help sustain biodiversity and rock their ridiculous evolutionary superpowers and, occasionally, make us feel like we’re in some low budget 90s horror movie when we go walking in the woods.

via GIPHY: Blair Witch Project