Snowy Owl 2018 Season
Changde Wu 2019-03-23
I have no expectation of taking good photos of snowy olws for the year of 2018-2019 season since the previous year was a break year. The next break year would be several years in the future. This is true since several visits to the usual areas either did not see any trace of the snowy owl or the owls were far away to photo. The news about a snow owl in the Sachuest Point NWR in Rhode Island had been circled for a while. Normally, the people from the Rhode Island would head to the north for view of such an amazing bird, not the other way around. I finally took a weekday afternoon to find out. The visiting was really rewarding, as the snowy owl was right in the grass land next to the visitor center parking lot, in a very close distance from the people. It was very actively hunting and flying. This encouraged me for another visiting in the coming Sunday, another amazing day.
By looking closely from the photo at the home, I found that the snowy owl was banded. When I revisited the site later, the snowy was not there for several days. I asked the people in the visitor center who did the job of banding. They told me that one photographer traced the tag and found out that the owl was released from a rehabilitation center in Quebec on September of 2018. That was why this snowy owl was not afraid of the people.
Selected Photos from Snowy Owl 2017 Season (3) - Owls and the Birders