Birdwatchers flock to snowy owl site
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Denver Holt, director of the Owl Research Institute in Charlo, guided a total of about 70 Five Valleys Audubon Society members to see the owls on Jan. 20 and 21. So many birders wanted to see the snowy owls that Rebecca Sills from the Five Valley Audubon Society had to set up two groups.
Sills got interested in the Snowy Owls when her grandmother showed her a newspaper article in late December discussing the abundance of snowy owls in Montana this winter.
“I’d never seen a snowy owl,” Sills said, “So I called up Denver Holt to see if he would consider leading an Audubon group to look for them. Denver was enthusiastic, but the only free Saturday he had was just two weeks away.”
Carpooling from the Allentown Restaurant at Ninepipes, more than 35 bird enthusiasts each day followed ORI staff Holt, Jessica and Matt Larson, Mat Seidensticker and family to Polson. The top of the hill allowed the snowy owls as well as the homeowners great views of Flathead Lake and the fields, houses and trees scattered to the base of the Mission Mountains.
Owls roosted on the rooflines of houses, porches, fence posts and trees in the neighborhood. Holt and company set up scopes so birders could get a close up look at the owls.
Holt, the Larsons and Seidensticker provided answers to questions and information about the owls.
Of the 250 species of owls in the world, 15 species call Montana home and 14 species raise their young in Montana, Holt said.
The reason the snowy owls are here “may be food-based,” Holt said, pointing to a big vole population. A dietary analysis done by ORI shows of 5,000 or more animal prey here, the owls ingested a hawk, a gull, and a weasel — but 90 percent voles.
Pointing out their heavily feathered feet, Holt added the owls’ plumage looks good so they must have had lots of lemmings to snack on in their home turf.
With a life span of about 14 years, snowy owls wait until they are four or five years old to breed.
Females prefer older white males as mates, and they pick one of the higher hummocks on the tundra and scrape out a little bowl for a nest. They lay anywhere from three to 11 eggs. Snowy owls do not breed unless the lemmings are abundant, Holt explained.
The owls are territorial on the breeding grounds but communal in the wintertime when adults and young birds, both male and female, live together.
Not limiting their birding to the snowy owls, the group returned to Ninepipes via backroads to view hawks in the Ronan area.
