December 28, 2008 - Snowy Visitor
Welcome to the Nature Notebook.

Winter can bring unexpected visitors from the far north. They take up residence in open, wind-blasted grasslands reminiscent of their tundra homes. These are North America’s heaviest owls. With their white coloration, Snowy Owls stand out from the crowd. Their hunting behavior does, too. Because darkness is fleeting during an arctic summer, Snowy Owls are active daytime hunters. That helps make these winter visitors easy to spot. Snowy Owls visit when winter becomes especially brutal or when lemming populations plummet. Without food to sustain them, they set their sights for more southerly locales, spending up to several months as far south as Pennsylvania and beyond. Even though these snowy visitors don’t show up every year, when they do they become quite the celebrities and owl watching becomes a media event.

This is PPL's naturalist, Jon Beam, with the Nature Notebook for WVIA.