Brian Prince and Craig Sims stood in a loading bay at the Little Rock Port Authority and pointed across the street toward LM Wind Power, where for several weeks they’d seen a snowy owl perching on turbine blades and gliding between trees and roofs in the area.
“It was a pretty bird,” Sims said Dec. 20, two days after the owl was last seen in the area. “Where he went to, who knows.”
The owl’s appearance came during an irruption, a huge southward migration of snowy owls from their arctic territories that, this year, followed a successful breeding period. Dozens of snowy owl sightings are recorded each year in the Northeast, but this year, the owls have been been spotted in Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia, according to eBird.org, a Cornell University project that tracks real-time bird migrations. A snowy owl was even spotted in Bermuda on Nov. 29. During past irruptions, they’ve been seen in Texas and California.
The last time a snowy owl was spotted in Arkansas was two years ago during another irruption, said Karen Rowe, nongame migratory coordinator with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. Snowy owls reportedly were seen in 35 states that winter. The owl in Arkansas was photographed but not reported until weeks later, Rowe said, and left the area before ornithologists could find it.
This time was different. Ornithologists, TV news crews and wildlife photographers watched and photographed the white-feathered, yellow-eyed owl for several days in the area of Lindsey Road east of Fourche Dam Pike. The last confirmed sighting was Dec. 18.
The owls usually travel in search of food, hunting prey in areas similar to the arctic tundra, Rowe said.
“That area [around the port authority] is large expanses of short grass,” she said. “We don’t have lemmings here in Arkansas, but we have shrews and rats, and that creates a short-grass area that’s very tundralike.”
Rowe said the owl was seen capturing a rat in a field near the Port Authority. About 2 miles away, Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport/Adams Field provided another expanse of flat land where the owl likely hunted, Rowe said.
Prince and Sims said they’d seen dozens of people drive slowly down Lindsey Road looking for the owl. Minutes after one car creeped down the street last week, a navy-colored truck pulled onto the shoulder, and its driver, 44-year-old John Bingaman, emerged with a camera. After propping his foot-long 800mm lens over the truck bed and scanning the area, Bingaman said he spent four hours the previous day trying to photograph the owl. He has photographed deer, grizzly bears, bison and other wildlife at multiple state and national parks. But capturing birds on camera is tricky.
“You’ve got to be fast. They’re a little skittish, so you have to have a bigger lens a lot of times,” he said. “Though from what I understand, that snowy owl is not as skittish as some.”
Bingaman didn’t get his photo that day. But he was right about the behavior of the snowy owl, which to several people appeared unconcerned with their presence, the steady noise of nearby Interstate 440 or the planes roaring to and from the airport.
“For a number of hours, I’djust walk out periodically, and you could just see this little white blob on top,” said Joe Tennison, who works at Ryerson Inc. on Lindsey Road. “One of the guys had binoculars so you could see a little better, but there were people lined all up on the fence and all along the road here, cars and stuff, just taking pictures and looking at it.”
Rowe said snowy owls don’t learn to be wary of such activity on the tundra. For that reason, their migrations can be perilous. New York City wildlife officials shot and killed two snowy owls at John F. Kennedy International Airport this month over concerns they would fly into planes. A snowy owl that traveled to Hawaii in the 2011 irruption was shot under the same circumstances, according to the Owl Research Institute. Snowy owls are often killed by power lines, too,Rowe said.
“It’s always amazing that the birds make it this far south, and it’s a hazardous journey,” she said.
On Friday, a dead snowy owl was found on the side of the road in Lonoke, apparently struck by a vehicle. It was unclear whether it was same owl spotted around the Port Authority, Rowe said. Wildlife officials will compare the body with photos of the Port Authority owl to determine whether there is a match.
The hope was the owl simply relocated after it disappeared. It’s not uncommon for snowy owls to have multiple perches, and there were also reports that a kestrel falcon had been pestering the owl, possibly forcing it away from the Port Authority area, Rowe said.
Rowe has asked that any future snowy owl sightings be reported to the Game and Fish Commission.
Arkansas, Pages 11 on 12/28/2013