Snowy Owl Breeding Habitat There are certainly a plethora of images of Snowy Owl shared here so I was not planning on posting any of my shots of this fantastic species. Nonetheless, since most of the images are winter ones, I thought it might be worth a couple of breeding habitat shots to provide a different perspective. I took these two photos while conducting surveys for the Manitoba Breeding Bird Atlas in the northeastern corner of Manitoba, Canada, near Hudson Bay and near the Nunavut border (essentially the southern limit of the breeding range of this species). Snowy Owls breed on the treeless tundra and they have some special adaptations to life in the extreme north; for example, they are longer winged and heavier than their closest relatives, which assists in flying in open habitats (the weight helps with windy conditions; the longer wings would be a disadvantage in flying through woodlands but Snowies rarely need to worry about obstacles). The ear tufts of Snowies are also greatly reduced in extent (remember that Snowies belong to the genus Bubo and their closest relative is the Great Horned Owl, although we only discovered this with the advent of genetic studies and subsequently removed Snowy Owl from the genus Nyctea and placed them in Bubo). If you peruse the various photos on this site you will notice that the tiny ear tufts on Snowies are only sometimes visible but usually not – rather like Short-eared Owl in that particular aspect, which you can also compare to their woodland dwelling congenitors. This is not unexpected since ear tufts amongst owls are generally found in species that prefer wooded habitats (there are competing hypotheses on the origin/function of ear tufts). On their breeding grounds, Snowy Owls are fond of eskers and ridges that provide suitable vantage points to hunt over the tundra and that shows in these two photos (one somewhat close and one far to give you the big picture). It is not surprising therefore that when they head south they find hay bales and poles give them the same vertical advantage to scan the vast human-altered landscape as ridges, eskers and kames do in the north. I’ll be the first to admit that these photos aren’t great but I hope they give some readers even greater appreciation of the essence of the great white owl…
Posted on: Thu, 07 Aug 2014 21:49:10 +0000
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