Birds of the Season
March 14, 1936 Snowy Owl (Nyetea nyetea)
Gliding on silent wings over the unfathomable stillness of the frozen prairie a great white bird floats eerily over the desolate bluffs and silent farms lying dark and shadowy below the shimmering northern lights. Across the bleak, windswept and snowbound fields a barely perceptible rabbit bounces with easy effort; and, as it passes over the unsuspecting hare, the shadow swerves and flits moth-like towards the ground. The unbroken silence is pierced by a single, quickly stifled scream and the shadowy folds of night envelop the last scene of the survival of the fittest.
The next morning I come upon a rabbit’s track that ends suddenly in the centre of a field, leaving no clue to its maker’s fate other than the clear-cut imprints of mighty pinions on either side of the last snow-filled track. To the observer such signs spell as if they had been written “owl” and I feel safe in declaring that the Snowy Owl, evil genius of the tundra, had passed that way.
This owl is one of the largest of the owl family and even the Great Horned Owl cannot boast a greater size. To the casual observer the Snowy Owl appears as a large, earless, white bird, faintly streaked with brown or grey and possessed of the most puzzling silent flight, a characteristic of most owls and one around which many fanciful tales are woven.
What little is known of the nesting of “Nyetea” seems to prove that it nests only in the Far North, laying its eggs in a hollow on the tundra. The eggs are white and range from five to nine in number.
When they hatch, the Lemming, Ptarmigan and other birds and mammals in the locality are sorely chivvied, for a young owl, or rather a nest of young owls, consume enormous quantities of food before they become the hush-winged masters of the tundra that the Snowy undoubtedly is. When the parents feed they are not at all discriminating as to what passes their rending beaks, and they swallow both the hair and bones of their victims; when the digestive juices have taken all that is digestible, they withdraw, and the remains are regurgitated in a soggy ball. It is a wonderful provision of Nature and might be a blessing to man.
The economic status of the Snowy Owl is probably about neutral, if anything a little on the useful side of the line. His food, while here, consists chiefly of small rodents and an occasional sick Hungarian or Prairie Chicken. The hunters must not condemn him for this, as he is only weeding out the unfit, thereby leaving a better and healthier race to carry on.
When the Snowy leaves his wild retreat in the North do not welcome him here with shotguns and rifles and do not shoot him as vermin, but let him live, a kingly bird among birds, fit to occupy the throne of monarch of the air.