Have you ever seen a great grey owl, the once-seen, never-forgotten spectre of boreal forest, the phantom of the north and the ghost of the forest in various folklores scattered across the far north of the northern hemisphere? It is a sizeable phantom: a yard tall and a five-foot wingspan, but it weighs not much more than two pounds, so that when it flies it floats, and its prey never knows it's there until a shadow the size of a raincloud darkens the last moments of vole, gopher, rat, mouse, grouse. Owls have a trait they share with wolves: the capacity to stop dead and vanish where they stand. When they perch next to a tree trunk, or settle into a nest in the fork of a tree robust enough to accommodate the bulk of a pair of them, then they simply become tree trunk. So why, given that the range of the great grey owl is North America, Scandinavia and northern Russia, and the nearest one to Borrowdale (a little to the south of Derwentwater) is likely to be in Norway (a little to the north of the Arctic Circle), why am I asking if you have ever seen one?.