One may appear along the lakefront, perched on a dock or tucked away inside a city park, camouflaged in snow, waiting in silence, hungry for another meal. And all the while blissfully unaware of the large, binocular-equipped mammals lurking in the distance.
It’s snowy owl season.
And although it doesn’t appear to be a boom winter for sightings, some owls are spending time in the city, bringing a bit of awe to the dreariest time of year.
Connor Sullivan, of Humboldt Park, traveled to a snowy Northerly Island last month. Sullivan, newer to birding, wasn’t expecting much. But against a backdrop of the city in his binoculars sat a snowy owl — the first he had ever seen.
“It was just kind of breathtaking,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan, struck by the sheer size of the bird, said there was surprise in the spotting, as well as it happening in a park that used to be an airport. He has a sabbatical coming up and plans to return to Northerly Island regularly — with a zoom lens.
“I think a lot of folks feel really disconnected from nature, including myself, living in the city,” Sullivan said. Until you have an encounter with, perhaps, a snowy owl, and “realize you actually are much closer to nature than you think.”
The birds — the males white, the females and young barred with brown, all looking out on the world with electric eyes — breed on stretches of open tundra in the Arctic. They can grow to be more than 2 feet with a wingspan double that, and weigh as much as a light bowling ball.
Their skill set includes ambushing prey with the help of sound-dampening feathers, and, when not swallowing prey whole, ripping apart their meals — mammals, birds, fish — with talons and beak.
After breeding at their summer grounds, some owls winter south, popping up along lakefronts, in prairies and, unwisely, airports.
It’s a decent year for snowy owls in Illinois, said Matthew Cvetas, an eBird reviewer for years and former Illinois Ornithological Society president. Hundreds of sightings have been recorded across the state but in total are still about half of the 2017-18 season, when sightings exploded. In the prior invasion in 2013-14, Cvetas saw eight snowy owls at 31st Street Beach alone.
Irruption years, in which many of the birds are spotted south, are believed to be linked to arctic food sources, researchers say. When there’s a lot of food, specifically lemmings — a hamsterlike rodent that the owls feast on and male owls may even present to a female in courtship — there tends to be more fledged owls. Those owls are then able to widely disperse, at times as far south as Texas.
In central Illinois, they may appear in agricultural fields; the Bloomington area tends to be promising for sightings, Cvetas said. In Chicago, a handful of birds seem to be focused along the lakefront.
Postings on eBird include recent sightings at Northerly Island and 31st Street Beach. One owl perched on the Grant Monument in Lincoln Park. One birder even spotted an owl while in traffic near Navy Pier.
“This is an animal that survives in really harsh circumstances — cold, barren areas,” Cvetas said. “And the fact that they come so far is really incredible.
The Northeast has seen more snowy owl action this season, said Scott Weidensaul, co-founder of Project SNOWstorm, which tracks snowy owls, gathering data on the nomadic birds.
“My standard joke is that my friends are cooler than your friends, because I get text messages from snowy owls,” Weidensaul said.
Close to 100 owls have been tagged with transmitters for tracking as part of the project. Some owls have appeared in the Midwest, including one named Fond du Lac who has traveled through Wisconsin and Michigan this season, but none of the tagged owls have been hanging around Chicago.
Through tracking data, available on the Project SNOWstorm site, researchers have learned that owls can be “highly nomadic,” Weidensaul said, especially in the breeding season.
“Snowy owls that are breeding in eastern Canada this year might be breeding in Greenland next year,” he said.
In winter, some adult owls return to the same place. Others, not so much. Three young male snowy owls were tagged along the New Jersey coast, Weidensaul said. Two hunkered down. The other flew up and down the Atlantic all winter.
“Hundreds and hundreds of miles. Why? I couldn’t begin to tell you,” Weidensaul said. “That bird had itchy feet, I guess.”
It’s estimated that fewer than 30,000 snowy owls make up the global population, and it’s considered a vulnerable species, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species.
Weidensaul said he’s long argued snowy owls are among the species at most direct and immediate risk from climate change, alongside creatures such as polar bears.
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The birds face more immediate threats as well, including collisions with electrical lines and exposure to poison from eating rats. Along with tracking, researchers turn to owl corpses for clues to what killed them.
“We have found by far the biggest risk to these animals when they come south is trauma,” Weidensaul said. “They get hit by planes, they get hit by cars, they get hit by trucks.”
As far as spotting one in Chicago, the effort may require some luck. Weidensaul said the owls may stick around “anywhere from all winter to 15 minutes from now.”
That’s all the more reason not to scare them off; birders say poor behavior in the presence of owls is a growing problem. Tracking data shows that owls inaccessible to people largely stay put during the day, Weidensaul said.
“If the owl is paying attention to you, you’re probably too close,” he said. “Particularly if it’s moving around and shifting its wings and showing any signs of agitation, back off.”
For a promised encounter with a snowy owl, one can head to Lincoln Park Zoo, where Stanley, an adult male who has helped hatch his share of chicks, may soon have a female companion.
As for why snowy owls tend to gather crowds more than, say, a sparrow, some credit their presence — gumball eyes and curious heads — or their personalities. A snowy owl in Washington, D.C., fond of perching around Capitol Hill recently found celebrity. Weidensaul said he suspects our fascination may be for more selfish reasons.
“They remind us of us,” he said. Which may be why we assume owls to be wise, even if they, “on the avian scale of intelligence, probably are not up there with parrots and crows and ravens.”
Writing about a photo of a snowy owl years ago, former Tribune columnist Mary Schmich said the bird seemed “to stir a similar sentiment in everyone who sees it.”
“It lifts a viewer out of the daily agitation, offers a small dose of peace,” she wrote.
And, many say, the Harry Potter connection didn’t hurt, with the young wizard’s snowy owl sidekick Hedwig depicted as smart, resourceful, trusted — a good friend.
Still, nothing beats the live thing — when, as Weidensaul said, “There’s a little piece of the Arctic in your backyard.”