40 Fun Facts About Snowy Owl

Which small rodents are the snowy owl's favorite food, with one adult eating over 1,600 a year?

Lemmings matter so much to snowy owls that a pair may not nest at all in a summer when the rodents are scarce.

What name does Harry Potter give the snowy owl he receives as a birthday gift from Hagrid?

Hedwig is a female snowy owl in the books, and a famous piece of the film soundtrack, Hedwig's Theme, carries her name.

At what time are snowy owls often out hunting, a habit that sets them apart from most owls?

Snowy owls often hunt in broad daylight because the summer sun never sets where they breed in the Arctic.

Where does a snowy owl mother make her nest and lay her eggs on the open Arctic tundra?

On the ground, usually atop a low windswept mound with a clear view, the mother scrapes out a shallow bowl and adds no lining at all.

What color are the eyes of an adult snowy owl, standing out sharply against its pale face?

Yellow eyes help make the snowy owl unmistakable, and they are sharp: experiments suggest the bird can spot prey from about a mile away.

Snowy owls have been seen trailing which Arctic hunter to scavenge the leftovers of its kills?

Polar bear kills are not the only free meals a snowy owl will take: the birds also pick at dead reindeer, walruses and even whales.

Which busy man-made places attract wintering snowy owls because they resemble flat, treeless tundra?

Airports offer wide grassy strips full of voles and rats, and Logan International in Massachusetts hosts snowy owls almost every winter.

In which US state alone do snowy owls nest and raise chicks rather than just visit in winter?

Alaska is the only US state with breeding snowy owls, which nest on its far northern tundra and on a few remote Aleutian islands.

Which Canadian province chose the snowy owl as its official bird in 1987 to symbolize its winters?

Quebec knows the bird by its French name, harfang des neiges, and two other Canadian provinces also picked owls as their official birds.

How does the plumage of a young male snowy owl usually change as the bird matures?

It turns whiter with age, though the change is slow: some males may not reach their palest plumage until they are nine or ten years old.

Which part of a snowy owl is covered by feathers longer than those any other owl grows there?

Toes on a snowy owl wear feathers about 33 mm long, more than twice the length of the runner-up's, like a pair of built-in snow boots.

What do snowy owls cough up about a day after a meal, packed with bones, teeth and fur?

Pellets pile up by the dozen beneath regular perches, and biologists pull them apart to learn exactly what the owls have been eating.

The rough territorial call of a male snowy owl is most often compared to the sound of what?

A barking dog is the usual comparison, and over the open Arctic tundra the call carries more than three kilometers, perhaps as far as ten.

Which trick do snowy owl parents use to lure a prowling predator away from their chicks?

Faking a broken wing, with thin squeals and a staged tumble from the sky, once drew a researcher about two kilometers away from a nest.

What color is the fluffy down that covers a snowy owl chick for most of its first weeks?

Dark gray down soon replaces a chick's first whitish fluff and camouflages it against the lichen-covered tundra.

How do snowy owl chicks leave the nest at about three weeks old, long before they can fly?

By walking off on foot, the chicks can hide among nearby rocks and plants, a move thought to make them harder for predators to find.

Why must a snowy owl swivel its entire head, up to 270 degrees, to look to the side?

Its eyes cannot move because they are fixed in bony tubes, so the owl relies on 14 neck vertebrae, twice as many as a human has.

What do birdwatchers call a winter when snowy owls pour south in unusually large numbers?

An irruption usually follows a bumper nesting summer in the Arctic, and the one in 2013–14 sent snowy owls as far south as Florida.

Which snowy owls make up about nine in ten of the birds seen far south in big invasion winters?

Juveniles dominate because these flights follow summers of unusually successful nesting, which leave the Arctic with a surplus of young owls.

What do some snowy owls perch on through the Arctic winter while hunting seabirds far from shore?

Sea ice gives the owls a perch beside polynyas, gaps of open water in the frozen ocean where seabirds are thought to be their main prey.

Which egg-stealing mammals of the tundra do snowy owls sometimes turn the tables on and eat?

Arctic foxes, both pups and adults, have been taken by snowy owls, even though these animals may be the worst thieves of their eggs and chicks.

What do Arctic geese and ducks gain by nesting right beside a fierce snowy owl pair?

Safety from predators comes at a price: the owls drive off egg thieves, but they sometimes eat their neighbors and the neighbors' young too.

In a crowded snowy owl nest, who sometimes keeps the newest hatchlings warm besides the mother?

Older siblings sometimes end up sheltering the youngest chicks, and unlike many owls, snowy owl nestlings are not known to attack one another.

Snowy owl parents have attacked which large grazing animal, probably to stop it trampling the nest?

Caribou are harmless grazers, yet nesting snowy owls dive at them anyway, and in one place the owls even went after farm sheep.

In which part of the world does the snowy owl outweigh every other owl species that lives there?

North America has no heavier owl, but in Europe the snowy owl ranks second, and a few Asian and African owls outweigh it as well.

Which feathery head feature, obvious on many big owls, is so tiny on a snowy owl it looks absent?

Ear tufts on a snowy owl are only about an inch long and made of roughly ten small feathers, raised now and then by a mother on her eggs.

The bouncy, fluttering courtship flight of a male snowy owl is often compared to which insect's?

A moth is the usual comparison: the male bounces through the air on slow, exaggerated wingbeats, often with prey dangling from his bill.

Which hunting style did snowy owls use in about nine of every ten winter hunts watched in New York?

Sit and wait is the snowy owl's standard method: the bird perches motionless on a post or rise, then launches a sudden, fast dash at its prey.

Which naturalist gave the snowy owl its first scientific name in the 1758 Systema Naturae?

Carl Linnaeus was fooled by the bird's variable plumage and described it twice, as if it were two separate species.

Which artist painted a male and a female snowy owl for Plate 121 of The Birds of America?

John James Audubon had all 435 plates of the book printed life-size on sheets more than three feet tall, so even this big owl fit the page.

Genetic tests show which widespread American owl is the snowy owl's closest living relative?

The great horned owl and the snowy owl are thought to have split from a shared ancestor about four million years ago, and both now sit in the genus Bubo.

Besides the snowy owl, which is the only other owl species known to breed in the High Arctic?

The short-eared owl shares the open tundra but is much smaller and straw-colored, and snowy owls have been known to hunt and eat it.

To which Red List category did the IUCN move the snowy owl in 2017 as population estimates shrank?

Vulnerable status came after new estimates put the world population at just 14,000 to 28,000 breeding adults, far below the 200,000 or so once assumed.

Which Arctic town, once called Barrow, has another name meaning a place where snowy owls are hunted?

Utqiaġvik took its present name in 2016, and biologists working on the tundra around the town logged 260 snowy owl nests over 21 years.

Which Canadian sealskin toy of the 1960s takes its name from the Inuktitut word for snowy owl?

Ookpik dolls were first made at an Inuit co-operative in 1963, shown at a 1964 trade fair in Philadelphia, and became a popular symbol of Canada.

On which Scottish island group did a pair of snowy owls famously nest between 1967 and 1975?

Shetland hosted the owls on its island of Fetlar, where an RSPB warden found the first nest and one male later kept two mates at once.

The snowy owl's scientific name, chosen in the 1700s, ties the bird to which northern region?

Scandinavia gives the species name scandiacus, while an earlier genus name for the bird, Nyctea, came from the Greek word for night.

How does a snowy owl usually eat a small rodent that it has just caught on the tundra?

A snowy owl swallows it whole and lets strong stomach juices dissolve the flesh; only bigger prey such as ducks gets torn into pieces.

Which bird of prey relentlessly dive-bombs wintering snowy owls, which cannot match its speed?

The peregrine falcon is a real danger as well as a pest: one killed a snowy owl in a high-speed dive after the owl took its fledgling.

Which game bird was the leading prey of snowy owls studied in Iceland, by number and by weight?

Ptarmigan made up over half the weight of prey in the Icelandic study, where 95 percent of the owls' diet turned out to be birds.