Animal · United States, Canada, Greenland
Snowy owl
Bubo scandiacus — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The snowy owl is one of the largest owls in the world and one of the few active during daylight. It lives on the treeless Arctic tundra, hunting across open snow and grassland.
Picture credit: Frank Vassen (CC BY 2.0) · Frank Vassen (CC BY 2.0) · Andrew C (CC BY 2.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the snowy owl live?
Home: The Arctic tundra of North America and Eurasia.
In the wild you find it in: United States, Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia.
Conservation status from the IUCN: vulnerable.
The short profile
Fully grown it measures 53–65 cm long, wingspan up to 1.65 m. It weighs about 2 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
Unlike most owls, snowy owls often hunt in broad daylight because summer in the Arctic barely gets dark. They feed mainly on lemmings, small rodents whose numbers rise and fall in cycles, and a snowy owl can eat more than 1,600 lemmings in a single year. When lemmings are scarce, some owls travel far south of their usual range in a movement called an irruption, sometimes turning up in places they are rarely seen. Male snowy owls are almost pure white, while females and young birds keep dark speckled markings their whole lives. Warming Arctic temperatures and changing prey cycles have pushed the species onto the vulnerable list.
Find it on the globe
Snowy owl is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Do snowy owls hunt during the day?
Yes, snowy owls are unusual because they hunt in daylight as well as at night. This is because summers north of the Arctic Circle stay light almost all day, so the owls adapted to hunt whenever prey is active.
What do snowy owls eat?
Snowy owls mainly eat lemmings, small Arctic rodents, and can catch more than 1,600 of them in a single year. When lemmings are scarce they also hunt birds, hares and other small mammals.
Are snowy owls endangered?
Snowy owls are listed as vulnerable because their population has dropped sharply in recent decades. Scientists think warming temperatures are disrupting the lemming cycles that snowy owls depend on for food.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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