I've added the Washington Snowy Owl records received last week to the
map on the web page
(http://salmo.cqs.washington.edu/~wagap/snowyowl/snowyowl.html or go to
the Tweeters home page and click appropriately).

The data are still only for Washington, but I'm still hoping to find
digital coverages for surrounding areas that will allow me to input the
BC, ID, and OR records.

There are Washington records for the Puget Sound area and the Columbia
Basin, but oddly, none for the Pacific shore. (There was one BC report
of a bird on the west side of Vancouver Island.) Has anyone out there
in birder land been to the coast lately and, if so, did you see any
Snowys?

I've added a table giving the number of Washington records for each
date and the total number of owls seen on that date. The largest
number of owls seen on a single date (in Washington State alone) was
18, from 8 records, on 11/16/96. The second largest was 16, from 8
records, on 11/09/96. The obvious conclusion is that Saturday is the
favorite birding day.

I still like the idea of a semi-coordinated effort to get a minimum
count a few times during the winter. I don't propose a rigid sampling
scheme. Perhaps if everyone birding on Saturday makes a special effort
to count and *report* Snowys in whatever site they happen to be
birding? Otherwise, as Snowys have become less exciting, fewer reports
will come in simply because people stop reporting them, not because
they don't see them.

Kelly Cassidy