Hi Tweets

Re the idea of having a Tweeters-wide survey of the number of Snowy Owls
(SNOW): it certainly wasn't intended to add to or replace Kelly's Website
(somehow I missed the post on that), which I think is a *way* cool way for
birders to make contributions on particular species, and a great,
easily-accessible use of available technology, but had more to do with the
idea of simply hitting the known SNOW sites throughout Cascadia and
tabulating the results either of a dedicated day or week. I'll admit to a
major curiosity regarding how many SNOWs are here at present; age/sex
breakdowns would be cool, too, but icing on the data cake.

Chris Hill writes:

>I like the idea in priciple, but wouldn't want to organize it. It takes a
>lot of manpower

Nahhh, people would just do what they've been doing on a random basis over
the last several weeks anyhow, which is reporting SNOWs from their
hunting/roost sites and whatever fortuitous roost sites where they park
their butts in the cities or towns of the region, except folks would be
doing it on a chosen day or in a chosen period. Kelly, does your Website
have a running total of observed individual owls? If not, if people wanted
to send their sightings to me privately after they've posted the locations
on Kelly's Web, I'd be happy to total 'em up and report the totals in a few
days. Age & sex 'em if you can, don't sweat it if unfamiliar with juv and
adult male & female patterning (though an adult male is often as near pure
white as a full albino, and some juv females are so heavily barred as to
appear at distance as a white headed bird wearing a dark grey vest).

>(I have a feeling Mike Price's idea of a "dedicated
>Sunday" might prove incapacitating for the average Tweeter).

Chris, the Laws of Physics that govern mere mortals do not apply to me*... ;-)

Actually, if you ever saw the way I wuss out from birding on rainy weekends,
you'd never have written the above. Anyway, it's amazing how big a Big Sit
list you can amass drinking espresso in a cafe while woolgathering out the
window.

>Much of the
>area is covered by Christmas Bird Counts, which should provide a pretty
>good picture of the distribution and abundance of Snowies.
>

Well, as far as Christmas Bird Counts (CBC's) go in this regard, I agree,
but it's a pretty good picture only of the SNOWs inside CBC count circles.
What are the chances there'll be a heck of a lot of uncountable SNOWs
*outside* the count circles? As someone once said, keep in mind that because
the earth isn't a perfect sphere but an oblate spheroid, the average count
circle boundary in the vicinity of a glamorous species has a maximum
elasticity of only 100 meters at these latitudes. ;-)

Besides, we really don't have a handle on whether most of the birds we'll
see come S more or less simultaneously, or whether there's a big rush in
late October to early November, with more filtering in behind them
throughout the winter, or exactly how an irruption like this actually works.
There seems to be an initial big wave of juvs, then a smaller one of adults,
though the timing is unknown (though I'm convinced that with enough study,
we'd know it's regular and predictable), and that their southbound move may
be over by the end of November to middle of December. How many stay, how
many wander, how many move further south? Because no-one's really
inventoried them here except on CBC's, what do we really know?

For example, though the Greater Vancouver (BC) Checklist Area gets SNOWs by
the *ton* in irruptive (read 'hungry owl'; they're not here to entertain us)
years, no-one's ever gone to all the known likely sites on one day (*easily*
do-able) and counted what would be close to an accurate total of the SNOWs
present in the area: the question has never come up. To do so through CBC's
would require participating in several CBC's over a period of a couple of
weeks with at least some likely habitat excluded; if the owls move around,
the data's snookered, and because we don't know enough, we can't even apply
a bugger factor to take that variable into account.

We *do* know that mortality can snuff some of them (is the proportion
significant?) fairly early in the winter, and I'd contend that if there were
to an inventory of the SNOW population, that the CBC period is too late and
too territorially limited to give an accurate total. Again, hunch says that
now would be good, but late December and early January too late.

Michael Price When I found out that one of my years was seven
Vancouver BC Canada of theirs, I started biting absolutely everything.
mprice at mindlink.net -Max Carlson (Ron Carlson's Dog)

*I swiped that line from Mark Gendron, a MIND LINK! consultant.
Michael Price When I found out that one of my years was seven
Vancouver BC Canada of theirs, I started biting absolutely everything.
mprice at mindlink.net -Max Carlson (Ron Carlson's Dog)