Snowy Owl Astonishes Birders in Southern California

A snowy owl has blown way off course and ended up in Cypress, California. That’s 25 miles south of downtown LA – and about 1200 miles south of where a snowy owl is usually found this time of year.

The wayward raptor showed up in residential Orange County a couple days after Christmas and has hung around since, delighting birders and other humans, some of them traveling hundreds of miles themselves to see the rare visitor.

Snowy owls are most at home in the Arctic. They’ll migrate south in winter, but rarely much farther south than the US-Canadian border. It is “extremely rare” to find one as far south and west as Southern California, according to Lori Arent, assistant director of the Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota. “It will be interesting to see how long this bird stays,” Arent told the New York Times. “The question will be: Will this bird be able to find enough food to eat?”

By all accounts (of a gaggle of birders who have descended on Cypress), the owl is not emaciated and in fact looks quite healthy. Staff at the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center of Huntington Beach found evidence that the owl is eating well: a regurgitated owl pellet that included a whole gopher skeleton. 

Who knows what will become of the visitor when the weather warms? Local gophers are hoping it returns whence it came, but it’s a long way back to the Arctic.

Photo credit: Raul Roa / Accuweather