I first met nature photographer Shahzad Khan on a cold December evening in High Park, a large swatch of greenery in Toronto’s West End. I had come to the park to feel reconnected to the world. That day, my worries were flooding my body with anxiety, making it difficult to feel anything. I knew that trudging across the snow-covered ground would bring me back to my centre. I began to feel more grounded when a small red-bellied woodpecker landed on my finger, calming me. Soon after, I encountered Khan, who was aiming a snow-white telescopic lens toward the treeline. I approached him to inquire what he was searching for so close to sunset. He told me he was a photographer, and that he was looking for a great horned owl that lived in the park. Stories of wise and powerful creatures filled my mind. I’d never seen an owl in person; my only encounters with them were on reliefs as the symbol of the Greek goddess Athena, or in the Guardians of Ga’Hoole fantasy book series, which features a great horned owl named Bubo who works as a blacksmith. I asked to accompany Khan; I was determined to see how the reality of these feathered creatures stacked up against my imagination. 

As we searched, I listened to Khan’s story. He had recently left corporate life and started to pursue nature photography. Khan’s passion for his craft is fuelled by adrenaline, artistry and the connections he builds with the creatures he captures in his shots. While we conversed, two other photographers emerged from the trails. They sought a glimpse of the same bird, and joined us in our quest. A party of four, we traded stories in low whispers so as not to disturb the pine leaves overhead. The photographers said that the owl was a widower; a mysterious, hard-to-reach loner.

As the sun began to set, draping the world in a purple twilight, a distant ho-ho-hoo hoo hoo came from above. During the mating season in winter, the owls become more vocal in their efforts to attract a partner. If there are a male and female owl in an area, they enthusiastically trade hoots in a ritual. On this December evening, only the hoots of a solitary owl resounded through the trees above us.

The photographers eventually traced the sound to the top of a massive white pine that stretched almost a hundred feet into the sky. Hidden among the shadows and foliage, the owl toyed with us, refusing to reveal himself. Khan grumbled that the owl always stayed hidden. We shuffled, treading silently over the snow, searching for a glimpse before the light left us completely. Only when the sun was about to dip past the horizon did the owl’s shadow finally brush against the last vestiges of light. His great wings reached for the wind as he pounced from the branch, moving as if the air bent itself to his body and the branches reached for his talons. After half an hour of searching for him in the snow, he appeared briefly and then was gone. 

Despite our brief meeting, I found the connection to the world that I’d felt I was lacking earlier that day in this great horned owl. I had to know more about him—and about the photographers who already seemed to know so much about him and the thousands of other species who call High Park home. 

Although I didn’t get much of a look at the owl at the time, as its feathers made it blend into the bark and foliage, I later learned that a great horned owl’s most characteristic features are the large tufts of feathers over its enormous yellow eyes. They seem like hairy ears, and make the bird look intimidating. Its black beak and claws curve downward. Its temperament is ferocious, described in 1926 by the University of Arkansas naturalist William J. Baerg as “morose and sullen … [the owl] often will fly viciously at anyone who attempts to handle it.” This aggression is not reserved for the people trying to handle the creatures. Many accounts describe the power that great horned owls levy upon other animals, from ospreys and crows to herons and even, rarely, small dogs. The species is nicknamed the “tiger of the sky” for good reason.

Great horned owls are found in territories spanning the Americas, from Alaska to the southernmost point of Chile. There are approximately fifteen variants of the species. Also known as Bubo virginianus, the owl has a wingspan of 91–152 cm, making it one of the larger birds of prey in North America. In Quebec, the owl is called the Grand-duc d’Amérique, literally the “great duke of America.” To Khan, High Park’s great horned owl is known as Gandalf, named after the wise wizard in The Lord of the Rings. Khan describes the elusive quality of the owl that made the magical name seem fitting: “I was in High Park around September 2023 when I heard hooting. It kept coming, and I managed to see him an hour before sunset,” recalls Khan. “I’ve never seen him in daylight since.” 

Despite being so difficult to find, Gandalf has nonetheless garnered a reputation among locals as a fixture of High Park. The territory he occupies, over 160 hectares of greenery in the middle of Canada’s busiest city, is precarious but ecologically diverse. Over two thousand species of animals reside in High Park, a menagerie that includes wood ducks, painted turtles and bold jumping spiders. The park is frequented by visitors, workers and community members who are passionate about the wildlife that call it home, and who treasure Gandalf’s rarely surfacing presence.

Gandalf and his evasive existence have an effect on the people who see him, as can be seen from the photographers who keenly search for him. Gandalf captures your imagination, as he captured mine on that winter’s evening in High Park. He can capture your heart, too, with the sense of tragedy that has haunted his life story. By looking at the history of this bird and the photographers who have followed him along the way, we can get a sense not only of who this mysterious owl is, but also of the world of nature photography and of human-wildlife interaction in urban spaces. Gandalf’s story presents an opportunity to study the complexities of how nature and people are intrinsically linked.

High Park’s nature photographers are not entirely sure when Gandalf arrived in the park; the best estimates place his entrance at 2014 or 2015. Many photographers assumed Gandalf had always been there. Richard Bod, a nature photographer who has taken pictures in the park since 2015, can’t say where the bird might have flown in from; but he was enchanted by the great horned owl, and by the challenge of spotting one. He describes the patience required to wait for an owl to surface, how it sometimes means sitting for twenty-five hours in dense woods doing nothing. For Gandalf’s admirers, these long waits are worth it. “In this community, there is a lot of love and respect for that bird,” says Bod. “We cherish the owl.” 

Gandalf may have lived in the park before 2014, or he may have inherited the territory from another bird. After leaving the nest, many owls become floaters, non-breeding solitary travellers. They look for a territory of around 7.5–10 km2 to claim, where they will have an opportunity to mate once they are of age. In areas where there are many great horned owls and few available territories, such as the Yukon, up to an estimated 40–50 percent of the population are floaters. Once a great horned owl manages to establish a territory it leads a solitary existence, living either on its own or as part of a pair. The species is extremely territorial, and will kill a rival great horned owl that tries to enter its territory. For Gandalf, High Park is his territory; although he wasn’t always alone in it. 

Great horned owls are believed to typically mate for life and remain monogamous. In their partnerships, the male hunts at night and brings the female food while she roosts with the eggs, which are typically laid in clutches of one to four once a year, and later with the chicks. Both owls take responsibility for teaching the chicks how to be owls. In quiet areas, away from other creatures, baby great horned owls learn how to track mice, fly (meaning, at first, fall from the tree and shimmy back up) and avoid red-tailed hawks. There is fierce competition between great horned owls and red-tailed hawks, both of which are raptors, or birds of prey; while the owls will appropriate the hawks’ nests for their own young, they also sometimes have to stop the hawks from attacking. 

From 2015 to 2022, Gandalf had a trusted mate—a female great horned owl who was also loved and respected by the High Park community. High up in the trees, in their nest that had been stolen from red-tailed hawks, the couple bore three clutches of owlets over the course of their union. Bod documented the owls, their courtship and their later union. “Owl love is mostly [hooting] close to each other, then they hoot again and then they move closer. When she says it’s okay, then they breed,” Bod laughs. His enthusiasm for the owls’ love story is strong; he describes all the pictures he snapped of them and their clutches over the years. 

David Evans, a photographer and self-described camera gearhead who often works in the park, describes the partnership between Gandalf and his former mate as slightly unbalanced. “He is one lazy bird. There was one time one of the hawks came to harass the nest, they do that often. They are also very territorial. And while the female was fending off the hawk from the nest, away from the chicks, [Gandalf] just sat there and watched. Did nothing!” 

Tragedy struck in January 2022. The female great horned owl was found dead in between the branches of a tree, fifty feet in the air. Bod wrote about the incident on his blog: “It was a very emotional moment for me. ‘It’s Nature,’ we say … but this was really hard. I felt like I had lost something special to me.” Bod echoes this sentiment in our conversations, grieving the loss of a real connection. It was as if a person who was part of the High Park community had abruptly passed, leaving those behind without closure. 

Carolynne Crawley is a member of the Indigenous Land Stewardship Circle, an organization dedicated to ecological maintenance and restoration through Indigenous stewardship. As part of the circle, Crawley helped coordinate the removal of the female owl’s body from the tree, and directed a City of Toronto arborist to place a tobacco tie, an offering of sacred medicine, at the spot. Members of the Indigenous Land Stewardship Circle, along with photographers and other community members, gathered to pay tribute to the owl. “We wanted to honour her, and took some time to do that. After the gathering, we sent the body with the support of Toronto Animal Services to have a necropsy, to discover what the cause of death was. We have many concerns with what was happening in High Park,” says Crawley. 

The necropsy revealed high levels of rodenticide in the owl’s body. The cause of death was severe hemorrhaging brought on by the poison. Though raptors are at the top of the food chain, they are still harmed by the cruel practices inflicted upon the animals at the bottom. “Rodenticide is a slow poison, it’s a slow death,” explains Crawley. “If [owls and other raptors] consume a certain number of poisoned mice or rats, then [they] will be poisoned as well. The little black boxes [containing rodenticide] are everywhere in the city, and mice are easy prey.” Once they ingest rodenticide, the rodents’ blood slowly clots, making them easy to hunt. The poison moves up the food chain, and has the potential to reach deeply, killing predators like hawks and scavengers like possums and vultures. 

The presence of rodenticide in High Park is a major concern for Crawley and other community members. There is widespread anti-rodenticide advocacy within wildlife conservationist circles. The group Rodenticide Free Ontario, for example, hosts talks and circulates knowledge to attempt to bring down the use of rodenticide in the province. However, the City of Toronto’s official guidelines still list the poison as a solution to the presence of rats and mice in restaurants and homes. 

The death of Gandalf’s mate is one tragedy among many caused by rodenticide. Her passing caused grief for the photographers and community members who knew her. “I feel like I lost a friend,” says Bod. Later on in 2022, a second female great horned owl arrived in the park. She was a yearling; too young to lay eggs, but still able to engage in courtship with Gandalf. After only a few months of courtship, she too would die, before the two could even solidify their union. Her feathers were found scattered on the ground—the body possibly taken by a coyote or an off-leash dog. It’s not known how she got on the ground in the first place. “He didn’t hoot as much after that second [death], he was really attached to his first mate,” recalls Mai Ly, a wildlife photographer who frequents High Park.

The tragedies of Gandalf’s life have resulted from threats both natural and man-made; predators as well as human-placed poisons. For the wildlife of urban green spaces like High Park, this is a familiar and exhausting combination. The nature photographers who enthusiastically follow these animals and the threats and tragedies they face sometimes act as their advocates and comrades. But other photographers, disregarding the ethics of their profession, can become just another threat burdening the animals that they snap pictures of. 

In the beginning of 2021, a clutch of three owlets was born to Gandalf and his first mate. Mai Ly, David Evans and James Beaton, photographers who had been watching and capturing pictures of the owls together since 2020, were presented with a unique opportunity. They could capture the lives of the great horned owl babies as the owlets grew up in High Park, all while working with conservation officials from the High Park Nature Centre, a charity that educates visitors on conservation and the park’s ecology, and the Owl Foundation, a rehabilitation centre in the Niagara region of Ontario. The three photographers, passionate about adhering to the best practices in their profession, joined forces in a partnership that celebrated a commitment to ethical photography. 

Ethical nature photography, generally speaking, means conducting your work while having as minimal an impact as possible on the wildlife you’re capturing. The National Audubon Society, launched in 1905 to promote bird conservation in the United States, has general guidelines for ethical photography in relation to birds. These guidelines include avoiding disturbing them or causing them stress, not disrupting their natural processes of resting and foraging and not attempting to change their behaviour, such as by making them fly or run away in order to capture a shot. The guidelines note that with sensitive species, such as owls, location information should be scrubbed from photos and videos. 

The three High Park photographers created their informal group because of their respect for their photo subjects and their desire to protect Gandalf’s young birds. Together, they deepened their knowledge of best practices for working with the owlets. “A lot of ethical photography is basically common sense,” says Ly. “Some of that research involved learning behavioural cues for knowing when an animal is calm, so that helped inform me on whether I was disturbing them or not.”

The High Park Nature Centre distributed a photobook created by the trio and another photographer, Tatiana Bitir, titled Great Horned Owls of High Park. The book features photos documenting the early lives of the three owlets, whom the photographer trio named Eddie, Alice and Louie; it follows them from their births in February 2021, up to when they were set to leave the nest in the fall of that same year. “It turned into a really nice project to have built over the course of the year,” says Evans. “It was always meant to be a memory of that time. A snapshot.”

The trio of photographers was key not only in documenting the young, but in saving them from peril. The owlets were born in a large tree about 130 feet off the ground, safe from people and predators. One day, Alice lost her balance and fell from the nest all the way to the ground. The trio, along with other volunteers, placed her in a box and brought her by cab to the Toronto Wildlife Centre, which provides medical care to wild animals. The next day, Louie started looking for his missing sister, who he thought was on the ground below; while searching, he too fell from the tree, and he too was brought by the photographers to the Toronto Wildlife Centre to be examined for any injuries. When the owls returned from the centre, they fell for a second time. The clumsy birds were sent to the Owl Foundation for ten days until they could fly on their own. 

The trio laughs with fondness at the memory of taking the owlets to the Toronto Wildlife Centre. “We thought it was really cool, but also a little absurd, to have this owlet in the back of a cab,” recalls Beaton. This close contact was a special exception to ethical photography guidelines, which stipulate that you should keep your distance from wildlife; the photographers literally saved the animals from potential harm. After falling from the nest, baby owls are at risk of being trampled or devoured by an off-leash dog. While Ly, Evans and Beaton willingly leapt into action to bring the baby owls to safety, other photographers do not carry the same knowledge of when to intervene and when to leave wildlife alone. For some nature photographers, an owlet on the ground is an opportunity for a good picture. In High Park and elsewhere, ethical consideration of wildlife is not a central concern for many in the photography industry. The impulse to capture a special photo trumps all else.

The trio has horror stories about the gangs of nature photographers in Downsview Park, a large green space in northern Toronto. “People will bait the owls all the time, get domestic mice from the store and put them in direct line to a photograph. And photographers will flush the owls, too,” says Beaton. Flushing is the practice of getting a bird to fly from its roosting spot, either by getting too close or by intentionally making a noise. After being flushed, an owl is exhausted, and if it does not find a place to rest and replenish its energy it can be in danger. “It makes the owls easy prey for predators, like coyotes or unleashed dogs,” says Beaton. 

Khan, the nature photographer I first met in December in High Park, decided to avoid Downsview Park after ­being horrified by an incident in which he saw an injured northern harrier being flocked by photographers. Khan also mentions a small pond in Markham, a city neighbouring Toronto to the northeast, where migratory shorebirds come to feed. Sometimes you can find an osprey there, a large raptor that hunts fish. “Every day, you see this crowd of photographers stamp their tripods into the sand and take pictures. Hundreds of pictures, all day, of this same bird,” says Khan. Through this crowding, photographers disturb the shorebirds’ natural rhythms and prevent them from feeding. According to ethical photography guidelines, these photographers should keep a safe distance—the National Audubon Society even lists shorebirds in particular as important creatures to be mindful of, as they need energy for the migration season. Yet these photographers harass birds like paparazzi harass celebrities.

One recent example of celebrity birds was the return of bald eagles to Toronto this past spring. The species nearly went extinct in Ontario fifty years ago due to the use of DDT, a pesticide that causes exposed birds to produce thinner eggshells. The bald eagles’ numbers in the region dropped to nearly nothing; but earlier this year a pair finally returned to Toronto and established a nest of eaglets. Yet, at this critical time, intrusive photographers threaten the birds’ safety. News outlets were asked not to reveal the location of the nests. “Once pictures or a location is out, then you have the birds being visited by people constantly, who tell their friends, who tell their friends, and it never stops,” says Evans. Pictures of the eagles ended up being sold to CityNews in May by an amateur photographer who had been scoping out the nest for months, and who found the eagles along with two other photographers. Especially in vulnerable cases like this, care for the animal in question should outweigh the desire to chase pictures of them. 

The future of wildlife in urban green spaces like High Park and Downsview Park rests on the implementation of ethical practices by photographers, visitors and community members alike. An organization like Crawley’s Turtle Protectors is an example of how this can happen. Turtle Protectors was founded in 2021 by Crawley and the environmentalist Jennifer Davis, after the two spent time with a nesting snapping turtle in High Park and were motivated to mobilize for the species. Turtle Protectors operates on the basis of two Indigenous knowledge principles: that the Earth and other beings are kin to humans and deserve compassionate reciprocal relationships, and that we must take the time to build these relationships. Turtle Protectors runs a hotline for reporting turtle nests in need of protection, enlists volunteers to oversee and identify the turtles, informs the public of the turtles’ needs and constructs boxes around their nests.

The guidelines of ethical nature photography resemble these Indigenous knowledge principles of respectfully interacting with nature. Through practicing their craft ethically, with the wellbeing and kinship of their subjects in mind, photographers can get a sense of closeness and reciprocity with nature. “I definitely have noticed a positive difference in how I interact with nature since picking up nature photography and coming to the park,” says Khan. “I feel most in sync at sunset and sunrise, most aligned with the animals and the environment. You get the best pictures at those times, too. When you’re around owls for a long time, you start to tell when the owl is feeling relaxed. You can see when it feels comfortable.” Other photographers I spoke to who work with the ethical tenets of their profession in mind feel a similar sense of kinship with Gandalf and the other great horned owls who have lived in High Park.

This process of improving our relationship to the other species we live among, and understanding our interconnectedness, is not new. The Indigenous knowledge and traditions that have shaped and maintained this land for millennia provide us with a guide on engaging with nature respectfully. In High Park, while there is room to grow in the relationship between municipal authorities and local Indigenous communities, there have been ways in which High Park officials have begun to acknowledge Indigenous leadership and stewardship practices. Since 2022, the Indigenous Land Stewardship Circle has been involved in traditional prescribed burns in the park, meant to proactively protect the rare black oak savannas. Like how the trio of photographers knew when to give Gandalf’s owlets distance and when to jump in to help, Indigenous stewards posit a relationship with nature where we care for the Earth as it cares for us. 

In High Park, Gandalf still flits through the treetops mysteriously, hiding from prying eyes both human and mechanical. If, on a visit one evening, you do manage to see him, don’t tell anyone which tree he’s hiding in. This protects him from predatory crowds of photographers or visitors hoping to see the High Park celebrity, sure; but it also keeps the feeling of discovery and connection alive if you let him come to you when he chooses. Two beings meeting on equal terms, brought together by the precarious landscape of a place somehow both urban and natural. ⁂

Alexander Taurozzi is a writer in Toronto who is working on his first novella and attending school for screenwriting and narrative design. His favourite writers are Frank Herbert, Octavia E. Butler, Mordecai Richler, the friends who sit through every late-night reading of a draft and the mentors who guide his hand and answer every question.