That you, Mothman?

This is the right half of one of the illustrations in Tove Jansson's picture book The Dangerous Journey (recently released in North America by Drawn and Quarterly). In the story, a young girl puts on a mysterious pair of glasses that changes her ordinary world into an extraordinary one, and the text accompanying this illustration includes the words "The sky was full of red hot clouds. Birds flew without a sound."

I was struck by how...familiar those birds looked. In the distance, we see some cranes, but flying roward the reader are what look like red-eyed, white owls that look an awful lot like a particular Ohio Valley cryptid. Did the little girls (sandhill?) cranes morph into a flock of Mothmans...?