An explosion in the population of lemmings in Canada resulted in a bumper crop of snowy owls born there last summer, and this means you have a rare chance to see one of these visitors to our area.
An unpredictable invasion of northern birds is known as an irruption. This year’s record-breaking irruption of snowy owls is not only the cover story for Audubon Magazine’s spring issue, but it is all the talk on birding blogs and among local clubs.
Approximately every four years the lemming population in the Arctic explodes, allowing snowy owls to provision their nests with huge mounds of dead rodents. Because they are well-fed and super fertile, female owls lay more eggs and produce more chicks – 10 or 11 rather than the usual one to three.
When the time is right, youngsters move south en masse. That is why a modest irruption is expected every four or so years. If an irruption year also combines exceedingly high food availability with a higher than usual concentration of nesting owls and early and deep snows, then the irruption can be astonishing in its magnitude, as this year’s is.
Conventional wisdom had it that these birds wander south due to hunger, flying ever farther from their normal surroundings until they perish from starvation. But Norman Smith, whose job it is to remove snowy owls from Logan Airport, says that “They’re in good body weight, they have lots of fat. These birds are moving because. . . there are just more owls to travel farther south. . . Some will starve to death, but that’s true of any young raptor.”
Snowy owls have been appearing all over – in Minnesota, the Maritimes, the Great Lakes, all along the Atlantic coast to the Carolinas – even in Bermuda! Snowies are diurnal hunters who eat small mammals, rodents, ducks, and seabirds. They prefer tundra-like habitat – flat or rolling fields and coastal dunes and marshes. They have also been spotted at airports. According to the Stokes Birding Blog, somebody spotted a snowy owl hunting at the Budweiser plant in Merrimack. Look for them on dock pilings, roofs, and lamp posts.
To improve your chance of seeing a snowy owl, head for the coast. Birders in Newburyport, Massachusetts have counted 24 individuals. Even better, travel to Nantucket, which is now ground zero for visiting owls and boasts the highest density anywhere in the US.
The 2013 Christmas Bird Count on Nantucket, which listed an all-time high of four snowy owls in its 75 year history, reported a startling 33 individuals. A friend of mine, Jen Esten, was on Nantucket recently and was kind enough to share some of her photographs. If you do see a snowy owl, please report your sighting to ebird, a national database. Also stay far away from the owl so you do not scare it or harass it.