Friendly snowy owl joins Great Lakes ship crew
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A friendly snowy owl landed on the Great Lakes freighter James R. Barker on Monday, much to the crew’s delight.
Before arriving in Two Harbors, Seaman Rick Germain snapped a few photos of the bird on deck and called it a “super cool experience.”
Photographer, author and birder Sharon Stiteler, also known as the Birdchick, joined MPR News Host Cathy Wurzer to talk about the species’ migration to Minnesota.
Stiteler said snowy owls often spend the winter in Minnesota. She believes the James R. Barker visitor is a young female and her behavior isn’t that surprising as new research emerges.
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“This isn’t unusual for a snowy owl to catch a ride on the Great Lakes, and one of the things it’ll do is it’ll go out and it’ll hunt ducks out over water,” Stiteler said, pointing to tracking studies by Project SNOWstorm. “In the past, we may have thought this owl was in trouble, but this is just a very smart young female owl who's using humans to her advantage for hunting.”
Snowy owls usually don’t venture further south than the Twin Cities metro area — but particularly snowy and cold Canadian winters can push them deeper into the state, according to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. There is a snowy owl hanging out at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport almost every year, Stiteler said.
Right now, waterfowl are also on the move.
“As long as the … lakes and rivers stay open, we’re going to have a lot of ducks. Migration really doesn’t die down until we get that big freeze-up, and that’s when we usually get, like, the millions of mergansers going through wet Red Wing,” Stiteler said. Sandhill cranes, too, are migrating and Tundra swans have been gathering along the Mississippi River — ”especially down around Brownsville and Weaver Bottoms.”
She anticipates another three weeks of migration remaining.
