Arctic visitors creating buzz aren’t reindeer
CHICAGO — Scott Judd trained his camera lens on the white dot in the distance. As he moved up the Lake Michigan shoreline, the speck on a breakwater came into view and took his breath away: it was a snowy owl, thousands of miles from its Arctic home.
“It was an amazing sight,” said Judd, a Chicago informationtechnology consultant. “It’s almost like they’re from another world. They captivate people in a way that other birds don’t.”
The white raptors, which can grow to about 2 feet long with 5-foot wingspans, have descended on the Great Lakes region and northeastern U.S. in huge numbers in recent weeks, hanging out at airports, in farm fields, on light poles and along beaches, to the delight of bird lovers.
But for researchers, this winter’s mass migration of the owls from their breeding grounds above the Arctic Circle is serious business. It’s a chance to trap and fit some of the visitors with tiny transmitters to help track them around the globe and study a long-misunderstood species whose population probably is far smaller than previously thought, researchers say.
“There is still a lot that we don’t know about them ... but we aim to answer the questions in the next few years,” said Canadian biologist Jean-Francois Therrien, a senior researcher at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania.
The solar-powered transmitters can last for years, collecting information such as latitude, longitude, flight speed and air temperature that is downloaded to a server when the birds fly into the range of a cell tower.
The use of transmitters, which intensified during the most-recent previous North American mass migration, in winter 2013-14, already has yielded big surprises. Instead of 300,000 snowy owls worldwide, as was long believed, the population probably is closer to 30,000 or fewer, researchers say. The previous rough estimate was based on how many might be able to breed in a given area.
This month, snowy owls were listed as vulnerable — one step away from endangered — by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. They’re protected in the U.S. under the Migratory Bird Act.
The snowy owl population collapsed in Norway and Sweden in the mid-1990s, all but vanishing there for almost two decades before reappearing at lower numbers, experts said. In Greenland, where the population collapsed in the late 1990s, researchers found a few nests in 2011 and 2012 after six years with no recorded nests, but owls didn’t come back in 2016 or 2017, when the population of lemmings — an Arctic rodent that is the primary prey of breeding owls — should have been in a cyclical peak.