Yes, I know, spring is coming. We’ve already had our complement of early spring Red-winged Blackbirds and grackles. Woodcocks are displaying, the first Killdeer have returned, and the increasing day length is starting to simmer the hormones of our resident Song Sparrows and cardinals, who are singing increasingly lusty versions of their territorial tunes.
But I’m not ready to let go of winter birding yet, so I want to talk about Snowy Owls. One turned up at Boat Meadow Beach in Eastham the other day, as if to remind us that winter has a lot more fight left in her.
While it hasn’t been a big invasion year like the epic incursion of 2014, they have been around for those who know where and how to look. A quick check of records in Cornell’s eBird database shows that several Snowy Owls have been on the Cape, Islands, and South Coast this winter. As is typical in a normal year, almost all of the sightings have been coastal. When they are not fighting for space with other Snowys, these birds want to be on a beach, where they can fly out and grab unsuspecting ducks after dark.
Two popular misconceptions about these owls are that they like to hunt during the day and that they mainly eat mammals, like the lemmings that sustain them through the Arctic summer. But the truth is that Snowys are much more active at dusk and beyond, and their favorite winter quarry is waterfowl. In fact, research has shown that many if not most Snowy Owls fly north for the winter, where they spend the season of 24 hour darkness hunting sea ducks at holes in the Arctic pack ice.
Race Point has hosted two at times this winter, and people have noted the grisly, headless remains of the ducks and gulls they have been eating littering the beach. One Snowy was seen hunting Black Scoters at the Race, and on a different day one was even seen chasing a small flock of Snow Geese out over the water!
The Snowy is our heaviest owl, with the biggest females weighing up to four and a half pounds, meaning they can tackle some mammoth prey. Mass Audubon’s Norman Smith, over 30 plus years studying these birds at Logan Airport, has cornered the market on cool Snowy Owl stories. Norm has seen them eating just about anything that moves, including Great Blue Herons and even each other.
In addition to Race Point, I knew of Snowy Owls wintering at Jeremy Point in Wellfleet, Nauset Beach, Sandy Neck, Corporation Beach in Dennis, Plymouth and Duxbury Beach, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and West Island in Fairhaven. But thanks to a Snowy Owl a tracking study called Project Snowstorm, I learned that we birders missed a few spots.
Through this site you can follow an owl named Wampum that was trapped at Logan Airport and released by Norm Smith at Sandy Neck in Barnstable back on December 30th. By clicking on her interactive map, you get an incredibly detailed picture of this owls movements after release, which included stops at a water tower in Centerville, Craigville Beach, Kalmus Beach, and the Hyannis breakwater, before eventually heading west along Nantucket Sound to Falmouth, down the Elizabeth Islands, and finally to Penikese Island, which she used as a base camp for a couple of weeks hunting Buzzards Bay.
Being able to so precisely track the movements of animals is a relatively new phenomenon in Wildlife Biology, and it can be addictive. So if you do check out the Project Snowstorm web site, which you can get to through Mass Audubon’s Snowy Owl Project page, you better clear your schedule – you’re probably going to blow a whole afternoon.
