The thing about owls is if they don't move or make some sort of noise, most of the time you aren't going to see them, unless one poops on your head.

So it's always really cool to see owls in Glacier National Park and the past couple of weeks have been gems, particularly because not only have I had the good fortune of running into owls, I've run into young owls, owls I have never seen before and may never see again.

More than two weeks ago was the first experience. Boy Wonder and I went out to a favorite meadow for no particular reason, other than it's a pretty cool place and no one else seems to go there.

I suspected it might have some flowers blooming in it and, for once, I happened to be right. Not only were flowers blooming in it, they were big patches of shooting stars.

A shooting star is a purple flower you see once in a while sprinkled in with other stuff.

I'm no flower expert, (you could smack me in head with a bitterroot and I wouldn't know it) but seeing that many shooting stars in one place was something I hadn't seen before so I took more than a couple photos of it, just in case I never saw it again.

After that the boy and I climbed a tree and then decided to go to the far end of the meadow for no reason other than it was a corner unexplored.

That's when I heard the strange little call. I've heard grouse make a sound like that, but I didn't see any. The calls came from the woods - one here, then one there, then one over there.

I saw a flash of yellow in a bush and thought to myself, well self, that's the strangest warbler call I've ever heard.

Then I saw a raven and a shadow went after the raven and the raven flew away with a squawk. The shadow was an owl. The squawks, as it turned out, were fledgling northern hawk owls.

I found three of them, took all their pictures while the adults watched from on top of a tree. Turns out, it was a pretty rare thing - northern hawk owls aren't common in Glacier.

Fast forward to Sunday in the same meadow: I ran into a guy who said he went through the same area.

"I saw a couple of deer and a whole bunch of owls," he said.

He told me where they were and Boy Wonder and I were off on another adventure. The boy caught his first frog along the way and we went to where the guy said he saw the owls. Didn't see them, though we did see a bunch of deer.

Then we went back to the same place where we saw our northern hawk owls 10 days earlier.

Once again, I heard the strange call.

Once again, I found some owls.

But now they were white.

Their feathers had changed and they were fatter and healthier looking.

Boy, they sure don't look like northern hawk owls, I thought. But my bird prowress is sorely lacking. Always has been, always probably will be. I tend to forget calls and get birds mixed up.

Like a few weeks ago I wrote about a yellow-shafted flicker and a birder wrote back politely informing me that unless the Earth had suddenly tilted and all the birds from the East Coast had sloshed over to the West Coast, that there were no yellow-shafted flickers in the West.

Only red-shafted flickers.

I made some joke about being, or getting, shafted in my reply. The reader likely took offense, because they didn't write back. Some birders have no sense of humor.

But, as usual, I digress.

Turns out that these little owls (which were actually quite a bit bigger than the little owls I photographed the week before) were baby great gray owls.

Great gray owls, as frequent readers may recall, were the reason I wet my pants a few weeks ago, because not only did I get a chance to photograph one in a tree. I photographed it with Glacier's mountains in the baackground.

It's the sort of thing that gives a wildlife photographer that warm fuzzy feeling. (You can also get this feeling by drinking lots of gin, though the heartburn the next day will kill you.)

So now I not only had photos of the adult great grays, I had the kids, too.

(As my grandmother would say, I had captured the whole fam damily.)

The day came to a close with a bang, literally. A thunderstorm was building in the distance and this woods was no place to be in a lightning storm.

Boy Wonder and I high-tailed in back to the truck and got out of there just in time. The wind blew. The rain lashed the windshield. And it got cold in five minutes.

I turned up the heat. The boy took a nap.

Life was good. Very good.

Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.