I recommend watching the video on the linked page! The narration is pretty over the top I think. The voice is exaggerated and there’s some funny comments in it that arent in the article. Also video of the owl.
I’ll put the follow up article in the comments.
— Dang it! Just saw this story was from last year, not this year. 😌 Oh well, I’m already committed. —
A snowy owl that looks like it should be flying about the wintry wizarding world of Harry Potter has been spotted among the palm trees of beachy Southern California.
Snowy owls are native to the Arctic tundra, where their largely white coats camouflage them in the snow, according to the National Audubon Society, which protects birds across the Americas.
“They’re most common in very, very North Canada,” said Jaret Davey, a wildlife technician and volunteer coordinator at the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center in Huntington Beach, California. “The southern limit of their winter range is in the northern United States. So it’s not uncommon for them to be in Washington or Minnesota or Maine in the winter. But to be this far south is really exceptional.”
Residents in a neighborhood in Cypress, California — about 25 miles south of downtown Los Angeles — got a Christmas miracle when the owl first appeared in mid-December. It has been spotted every day since December 27.
“It’s astonishing to see a snowy owl in Southern California,” said Chris Spurgeon, program chair and member of the board of directors at the Pasadena Audubon Society, a local chapter of the National Audubon Society serving the Greater Pasadena area of California.
Spurgeon and Davey aren’t alone in their excitement. There have been hundreds of people admiring the owl some days, and some have traveled hundreds of miles, Davey said.
“In February … I flew to Manitoba (Canada), and then drove several hours north just to see a snowy owl,” Spurgeon said. “It was 25 degrees below zero in northern Canada. I never thought I’d see one standing in my shirtsleeves on a suburban street in 70-degree weather.”
Snowy owls are classified as vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources’ 2021 Red List of Threatened Species. There are fewer than 500,000 snowy owls in the world, which isn’t a huge number “when it comes to birds,” Spurgeon said.
“We could be vastly wrong with that number because they do live so far away from most people,” he said. “And unfortunately, many birds are threatened by climate change. With the changing conditions in the Arctic, it’s affecting them as well as everyone else.”
Origin story unknown No one knows exactly why and how the West Coast snowy owl got to a place so far from its natural habitat, but bird experts have a few theories.
“Birds that migrate do occasionally do crazy things: go in the wrong direction, go too far, migrate at the wrong time of year, stuff like that,” Spurgeon said.
This can also happen if a bird is young and hasn’t migrated many times before, Davey said. The brown spots on snowy owls’ feathers usually get wider as they age, so the size of the California owl’s spots suggest it could have been born within the last couple years, Spurgeon said.
The owl could have hitched a ride on a passing cargo ship while flying across the sea, went all the way to a seaport and found itself back on land, Spurgeon and Davey said. It also could have escaped from being illegally kept as a pet.
“Oftentimes with really beautiful animals like the snowy owl, people will get them on a black market and then illegally keep them as pets,” Davey said. However, he said the owl did not appear to have a leg band, clipped talons or clipped wings that would suggest they had been kept in captivity.
This snowy owl’s future When Spurgeon saw the snowy owl, it didn’t look emaciated or unhealthy, he said. But some birdwatchers did think the owl might have been experiencing symptoms of heat stress during the first couple of days, Davey said.
“It looked like it was breathing really heavy. Its feathers were all fluffed up to try to shed heat,” Davey added. “Since then, it seems to have been doing just fine.”
Southern California is relatively cold now, but the owl could be at risk when the weather warms up in the spring, Davey said.
Snowy owls are carnivores and typically eat small rodents — especially lemmings — but can eat animals as big as geese, Davey said.
With parks, open fields and grasslands nearby, experts think the owl shouldn’t have difficulty finding food during its stay. In fact, there has already been evidence that the owl has been eating well — in a pellet the owl regurgitated, staff at the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center found a whole skeleton of what might have been a gopher.
“All owls do regurgitate small little pellets just of indigestible material because, unlike us, where (when) we eat a piece of meat we eat around the bone, birds of prey just eat the whole thing,” Davey said. “For the small little bones they can’t digest, they just cough it back up.”
Someone’s YouTube video before the story broke. Lots of good faces and head spinning.
LA Times: Rare snowy owl that drew flocks of bird-watchers disappears from Cypress neighborhood
20 JAN 2023
A snowy owl that found its way to a rooftop in west Orange County has flown the coop, according to local birders who rapturously monitored the unique visitor over the last month.
Perched atop a roof on Onyx Street in Cypress, the snowy owl arrived without warning in early December, seemingly unaware that it was several hundred miles south of its usual habitat in the Arctic regions of North America. The owl would fly away every evening, just around sunset, then return to the rooftop the next morning, according to Cypress resident Roy Rausch.
The owl, which left on Monday around 5 p.m., has yet to return.
“I would actually go there first thing in the morning when the sun was coming up to try and just make sure the Cypress snowy owl was still there and to spend a little time with it,” Rausch said. “It was really very special to me, and it has profoundly affected my well-being, my life, and it was almost kind of spiritual to be there with it.”
With her penetrating gaze and white plumage spotted with brown, the owl transfixed her myriad spectators. Male snowy owls are usually all white, while females are flecked with brown. Bird-watchers and curious people alike flocked to the residential neighborhood to get a glimpse of the bird. She perched atop rooftop vents, chimneys and on top of telephone poles. She put up with some crows and the Southern California rain, all the while making her way around the neighborhood like any other bird.
The owl was first spotted in Los Angeles County on Nov. 12, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. She then made her way inland to Cypress and was first seen there in mid-December.
Chris Spurgeon, program chair with the Pasadena Audubon Society, said the bird could have been blown thousands of miles off course by a storm, or perhaps it caught a ride on a freighter headed to Southern California’s ports.
“They’re not supposed to be here — normally they don’t venture farther south than Oregon,” he said.
How or why she flew south is anyone’s guess, said Denver Holt, founder and lead researcher of the Owl Research Institute. The owl’s feathers appeared healthy, which probably rules out that she was kept in captivity, and there didn’t appear to be any type of tags on her feet, he said.
She appears to be about 7 months old, and based on her age, this is probably her first migration and first foray into Southern California, said Holt, who gave a lecture on the owl in Cypress on Thursday.
There have been snowy owl sightings in parts of Texas and Florida, but a snowy owl spotted in a densely populated residential area of California is rare, Holt said.
“I mean, it’s in the middle of a California housing development,” Holt said. “It’s just house after house after house. It’s not unusual for them to get on … man-made structures, but this is just a very, very densely populated area.”
Now, just as unexpectedly as she arrived, the owl has left Cypress. There’s no telling what made her leave, said Rausch, who considers himself an intermediate birder.
“There’s a bit of sadness that she’s gone, but sadness in a good way,” Rausch said. “She really meant a lot to many different people in many different ways.”
When news spread that the owl, or “Snowy” as locals took to calling her, was gone, local residents said they felt a real sense of loss.
“I’ll admit, I feel like she stole my heart,” Cypress City Councilwoman Frances Marquez said. Many neighbors who gathered to bask in the owl’s beauty connected with one another for the first time, even though they had lived in the same neighborhood for years, Marquez said.
“I grew up in Cypress and I have to say that this is the coolest, most educational thing to happen to our community,” Marquez said. “I have all these new friends because of this owl.”
