Snowy Owl — Wings of NH

What you notice first

A big white lump on the flattest, bleakest ground around — a dune crest, a jetty boulder, an airport fence post — that turns its head and watches you with yellow eyes.

Voice

Silent in winter, as a rule.

Where & when

The Hampton and Seabrook dunes and jetties, the fields and airfield edges around Great Bay, the Isles of Shoals, and — most winters that produce any at all — one or two on flat farmland inland. Late November through February; a lingering bird sometimes into March.

Why it's hard

It doesn't come every year. Snowy Owl flights are driven by lemming cycles on the Arctic tundra — a boom summer produces many young that push south the following winter, a bust summer produces almost none. In a big irruption year they're findable; in a quiet year, there may be none in the state.

The Snowy Owl irruption is one of the few genuinely spectacular birding events that comes to New Hampshire rather than the other way around, and the winter of 2013–14 was the biggest in living memory — birds on jetties, roofs, and beaches up and down the coast, and a burst of research (Project SNOWstorm) that tracked them by GPS and rewrote a lot of what was assumed.

The old story was that irruptions meant starving owls fleeing a food crash. The tagging data says the opposite: most are healthy young birds from a good breeding year, hunting ducks and rodents on our coast and doing fine.

Adult males can be nearly pure white; females and young are heavily barred with black. They hunt by day as often as not up here. Keep your distance — a photographer who flushes a hunting owl off the dunes costs it energy it can’t spare.