Return of the snowy owls

Reports of snowy owl (SNOL) sightings have been coming in by the hundred from across the nation. My pal from the old OMSI days, Bart Butterfield - who is now in charge of the GIS Division of Idaho Fish and Game - sent me an email the other day with an attached map of all the SNOL sightings in the U.S. and Canada. If you want to see it, go to http://g.co/maps/r9ub2.

But the first report I received of a snowy in Oregon came from Sisters photographer and kestrel volunteer Dick Tipton last week. He found that beautiful female in the picture feasting on rodents at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

Snowy owls are the largest of our owls, both in weight and size. The great gray owl of our boreal forests is big, but it weighs only a fraction of our local great horned owl, and compared to the SNOL they're both lightweights.

The big owls of the north have an impressive grocery list; the smallest prey being lemmings and mice, and the largest, Arctic fox cubs - along with assorted snowshoe hares, grouse, and ptarmigan - and a goose or two when opportunity shows itself.

The marching-to-the-sea story about lemmings is familiar to anyone who is interested in animal behavior, and may be true to some degree, but when there are too many rodents in a given habitat, it's usually disease that brings their populations back to "normal." The sudden appearance of tularemia - the deadly disease that knocks down our burgeoning jackrabbits, mice and vole populations - is an example.

Contrary to popular opinion, it is not the predator that controls the prey, but really the other way around. In the arctic, when lemmings, hares and ptarmigan are in high numbers, snowies are living high on the hog. But when the prey-base population crashes, the only way the snowies can survive is to leave home and head for what may be better feeding grounds, which is south.

I was very fortunate to witness the last huge movement of snowies back in the mid-'60s. I was the naturalist for OMSI, and also having fun writing for the Oregonian magazine section. When the sudden appearance of snowies took place that winter, I wrote a story about it in the Oregonian, and included a mail-back postcard for anyone who wanted to report a snowy sighting. The response was overwhelming.

I received hundreds of postcards from people all over the state, including - believe it or not - one from a woman who was on her way to Hawaii on a ship off the coast of California, who had a snowy land on the deck!

I palled around with Dr. Matt Maberry, the Oregon Zoo's veterinarian in those days, who had his own personal airplane, a low-wing, single-engine Mooney. When I told Matt about all the snowy owl reports I'd received, he suggested we go through the most likely ones and then take his Mooney and tour the state, checking on each owl report.

Except for a very few, they starved to death. They ended up in habitat unfamiliar to them and without the rodents or other prey with which to make a living. In the time Matt and I spent touring the state, I personally handled over 215 owls, most of them dead.

Snowy owls are diurnal, not nocturnal; they move about from sun-up to sun-down. If you see what appears to be an over-sized white football sitting in the middle of a field, it's probably a snowy. In flight, they move fast with a strong wing-beat close to the ground.

If you see a big, white bird flying by in the dark, however, it is in all probability a barn owl; they are nocturnal and very light beneath the wings, or it could be a great horned owl. In daylight, it's difficult to mistake a snowy.

If you do have a sighting of what you really believe is a snowy, please take a moment and go to the Oregon Birder's On Line website and report your observation:

http://birdingonthe.net/

mailinglists/OBOL.html. Or, if you find it on Cloverdale Road, Deschutes Land Trust's Camp Polk Preserve, or out on the Rim Rock Ranch, please call me immediately at 541-480-3728!