For the past 12 winters I have been photographing and observing snowy owls in farmers’ fields northwest of Elmira, Ont. — with permission from the landowners, and a pocketful of dog treats to befriend off-leash farm dogs.
While snowy owls typically roost on the ground, they prefer a higher perch — a tree, a fencepost or hydro pole from which to hunt prey.
To witness a hunt is truly a memorable sight.
A young male owl hunts next to a road. He appeared at a time when all the other owls had begun their migration back to the Arctic.
My favourite female owl of 2023 often hunted near me. On this occasion she had flown across a field catching a pigeon in mid-air then returned to eat, until two farm dogs frightened her off.
Their feathers allow near-silent flight as they swoop down to attack their prey, such as meadow voles, mice and birds. But it takes practice; I’ve witnessed inexperienced young owls chase pigeons round and round a grain silo and fail. Meanwhile, a mature female I encountered one winter targeted a pigeon 300 metres across a field and snatched it out of the sky.
A female snowy eats her prey. Her appearance frightened off a young male owl I had been photographing. No sooner had he fled than she caught a kestrel and devoured it.
The same young female snowy owl with a meadow vole she has just caught. She would swallow it in front of me with three gulps.
In a good year, I might have seen as many as 10 snowy owls in the roughly 10-square kilometres I routinely cover. But in the past two years, only two or three have made their way to these fields for the winter, after spending the summer on the Arctic tundra. Birders and ecologists across Ontario and Quebec have also reported fewer sightings in recent years.
The dark brown patches on a snowy owl’s feathers are known as barring. Young males and females are virtually indistinguishable, but as they age, and go through annual molts, the males gradually lose their barring at a faster rate than females.
Although some snowy owls remain in the Arctic year-round, many begin migrating southward in late autumn. In years when an abundance of lemmings can be found on the tundra, the number of chicks born — or the clutch size — can be larger. The young owls aren’t ready to compete with experienced hunters, meaning they are pushed south.
Over the winter of 2021 this young female became comfortable hunting while I photographed her. This was one of several voles she would catch that night during a freezing rain storm.
During intense wind and freezing rain, she spotted a vole and flew past me to catch it. She then flew to a spot in front of me and swallowed it.
An adult male regurgitates a large pellet of indigestible parts of its prey — bones, feathers, fur and teeth.
In preparation for their evening hunt, snowy owls will preen, regurgitate pellets, defecate and then stretch their wings.
Some migrants enjoy wintering in Ontario’s lake country, where waterfowl are abundant, while many prefer flat, open farmland that resembles tundra. With incredible eyesight, the ability to turn their heads about 270 degrees and phenomenal hearing, they are able to home in on mice and voles across a field.
During a blizzard, an adult male snowy owl suddenly spun around to defend himself from another male that made claim to the field.
But snowy owls that find their way south face human-related threats such as electrocution from power lines and rodenticide poisoning in the mice and voles they eat. Automobile collisions, though, appear to be the most common cause of death among snowy owls wintering in eastern North America.
An injured young female snowy owl is fed pieces of rat meat during a brief stay at Wildlife Haven in Waterloo, Ont.
Two days later I drove her to The Owl Foundation, in Vineland, Ont., for further rehab.
After a few months of rehabilitation at The Owl Foundation, this young snowy owl was released near Midland, Ont., in April 2022.
In the North, climate change has severely impacted Arctic ecology, with the region warming three times faster than the global average, threatening the survival of many plant and animal species including the snowy owl. As the treeline creeps north in the warming climate, the snowy owl’s tundra is also giving way to forest.
During a snow squall, an adult male owl waits for the clouds to part, remaining there for more than an hour before flying to his favourite tree.
Lemmings are their main source of food in the Arctic, and breeding success is intertwined with any fluctuation in the population of these rodents. A healthy number of lemmings generally means more “snowies.” The opposite is also true. As snow cover thaws and refreezes amid warmer temperatures and rainfall, lemmings — who can forage plants and lichen through snow — are prevented from reaching their food sources by the ice.
An adult male snowy owl had been roosting along a fenceline, when a female owl at a nearby grain silo caused him to relocate.
Female snowy owls are bigger than males. This is known as reverse sexual dimorphism. This adult male had been sitting on the ground for an hour when the female, which had been perched on a nearby fencepost, suddenly attacked him.
Warmer temperatures could also see the northward advance of insect borne diseases such as West Nile virus, which has been found in migrating snowy owls. Snowy owls are also gradually losing their circumpolar habitat as mining interests grow in the Canadian North and oil and gas interests take up space, such as along Alaska’s northern slope. The massive oilfield in Prudhoe Bay is 300 kilometres east of a traditional snowy owl breeding site in Utqiagvik, Alaska. And there is also the looming threat of legacy oil spills in the area, south of Utqiagvik, the town formerly known as Barrow.
At sundown this female snowy flew across a field towards me and landed on a nearby hydro pole. Her level of comfort with me caused me to wonder if she was my favourite from two years earlier. Some snowies will return to winter locations and her flight feathers showed clear signs of molting, meaning she was a couple of years old at least.
There has been a 30 per cent reduction in the breeding snowy owl population over three generations, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Since 2017, the International Union has classified snowy owls as vulnerable to extinction. The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada reported in May that, with a population decrease of more than 40 per cent over the past two decades, snowy owls are now threatened — one step away from endangered.
The winter still brings snowy owls south. But for how much longer?
I’d observed and photographed this adult male snowy owl regularly in the winter of 2021/2022. An extremely rare encounter, this is one of only a half dozen occasions I have experienced an owl coming straight towards me.
