The charm of Startled Owl is in its playful portrayal of an oft-depicted subject in Inuit art, the owl, which is here pictured as a fearful - and possibly angry - creature with wild eyes, wide open beak, and erect plumage arranged to create a lively decorative pattern. The image is graphically very strong, and was used for many years by the TD Bank to promote its Inuit art collection. Angotigaluk was not prolific like her husband, Jamasie Teevee; fourteen prints were created from her drawings before her death in 1967. Her bird images are in some ways similar to the equally charming prints by her contemporary, Lucy Qinnuayuak.

Startled Owl is one of roughly seventy prints collectively known as the “Dorset Series” (also called the Dorset Collection, the Northern Collection, or Northern Releases). These prints were not included in catalogued annual Cape Dorset print collections, and were therefore not sold in southern galleries. Rather they were sold informally and locally to visitors through the West Baffin Eskimo Co-op; they tend to be rarer in the art market than “regular” prints.

This image is illustrated in The Eskimo Art Collection of the Toronto Dominion Bank (Toronto-Dominion Bank, 1967), pl. 236, unpaginated. For a quite similar contemporaneous image by the artist, released in 1964, see Susan Gustavison, Arctic Expressions: Inuit Art and the Canadian Eskimo Arts Council 1961-1989 (Kleinburg: McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 1994), cat. 42.