Birders

HISTORICAL RECORDS FOR SNOWY OWLS IN CALIFORNIA, ALL FROM MONTEREY NORTH, EXCEPT FOR THE CURRENT (RED) BIRD NEAR LOS ANGELES. (EBIRD/CORNELL LAB OF ORNITHOLOGY)

https://www.projectsnowstorm.org/posts/a-year-end-update-and-an-out-of-place-owl/

Scott Weidensaul December 30, 2022

The biggest snowy owl news in the past week comes from an unexpected place — southern California.

Some months back a video of a snowy owl on a rooftop, reportedly from San Pedro, near the Port of Los Angeles, was posted to the iNaturalist website. Given the absence of previous records of that species so far south on the West Coast, there was initial skepticism about the veracity of the report, and an immediate assumption that, if valid, it likely represented an owl that rode a ship into the port. But there were no further observations, and the speculation died off.

Then on Monday, a video of a snowy owl from Cypress, CA, about 15 miles (23 km) east of the port, was posted to the California rare birds Facebook group, and this time the bird was quickly refound and verified. That also restarted the debate about its origins. There are California snowy owl records, all (so far as I am aware) from Monterey north, and all from years when there were big flights along the Northwest coast. That is not the case this year, when there have been no reports of other snowy owls anywhere south of Alaska or west of the coast ranges.

The assumption, again, is that this owl rode south on a ship from — well, no one can hazard a guess. A few have pointed out that snowies can cross long distances of open water, like the multiple records in Bermuda, or one that made it to Hawaii about a decade ago. But those incidents, again, generally coincided with big irruption flights.

Snowies do land on ships. During the irruption flight of 1945-46, ornithologist Alfred Gross documented more than two dozen cases of snowy owls landing on vessels in the north Atlantic, and in 2021 birders in Spain were agog when not one but three snowy owls showed up, the first ever seen in Spain, two of them close to a large and active port.

Whatever the California Bird Records Committee decides regarding the countability of the Cypress owl, it’s made a lot of SoCal birders very happy this holiday week.