The Year of the Owl

Anyone who wanders down a U.S. country road this winter may be startled at the sight of a great white bird drifting close on five-foot silent wings. The bird's head is as big as a grapefruit, its yellow eyes glitter balefully. But there is no cause for alarm: it is only a displaced snowy owl (Nyctea scandiaca), a refugee from a lemming shortage in Canada.

Last week, Audubon Society members had completed scores of bird counts which proved that the U.S. will have a booming owl winter. From Arctic Canada had come reports that lemmings, the mouselike rodents which are the favorite food of snowy owls, are critically scarce. In years of plenty, when Arctic vegetation is growing vigorously, the lemming population builds up until the barren lands are alive with lemmings. The owls increase too. Well-fed with lemmings, they lay and hatch clutches of ten eggs or more.

But every three or four years, hard times come to the barren lands. For some reason (possibly sunspots), the Arctic vegetation is not so nutritious as usual this year; the lichens and mosses on which the lemmings feed apparently lack vitamins. Naturalists call such a time a "crash year." On noiseless, downy wings the great owls drift across the U.S. boundary looking for U.S. mice. Sometimes they get as far as southern Illinois or even the Carolinas.

The snowy owls do no harm, never attack human beings, live almost entirely on rodents. Unaccustomed to civilization, they blunder into odd places. Last week for the first time the owls invaded Washington, perched on Government buildings, and swooped down to feed on the bothersome starlings. Five of the interlopers landed at Detroit's Willow Run commercial airport, were shot from the ILS poles because airmen feared they would throw the electronic landing beam off its bearing. Dr. George Miksch Sutton, ornithologist and bird painter of the University of Michigan, who had predicted this year's invasion, says that by late February the surviving owls will be heading back to lemming land.

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