Subject: Snowy Owls the 1973 irruption
Date: Feb 2 21:12:28 1999
From: WAYNE WEBER - WAYNE_WEBER at bc.sympatico.ca


Mike, perhaps you didn't check the 1973 B.C. Christmas Count results for
Snowy Owls. That year, the Vancouver CBC tallied 27 Snowy Owls, and the
Ladner, B.C. CBC a whopping 107. The latter total, I believe, still stands
as the all-time North American CBC high count for Snowy Owls.

To answer your question, yes, the owls were stacked up pretty thick. The 107
owls on the Ladner CBC were not evenly distributed, but were concentrated in
areas such as the Boundary Bay shoreline and Westham & Reifel Islands, where
they usually concentrate in flight years.

In Vancouver, our first indication that something profound was taking place
was on November 10, 1973, when Jack and Eileen Husted reported a count of 21
Snowy Owls on the Iona Island south jetty near Vancouver. This jetty is just
a little over 2 miles long, and a count of 21 Snowies there boggles the
mind. In my seasonal report to Harry Nehls, who was then one of the AMERICAN
BIRDS (currently FIELD NOTES) Regional Editors, I made some comment like "we
suspected that something was afoot"!

I think there is plenty of evidence to indicate that the 1973-74 irruption
was the biggest flight of Snowy Owls west of the Rockies in the last 50
years. Other impressive invasions were in 1966-67, 1984-85, and 1996-97.
(The Ladner CBC logged 40 Snowies in 1984). Incidentally, my first-ever
Snowy Owl was seen in December 1966 on top of the flagpole atop Vancouver's
City Hall-- not exactly typical habitat for this species!

Wayne C. Weber
114-525 Dalgleish Drive
Kamloops, B.C. V2C 6E4
(250) 377-8865
Wayne_Weber at bc.sympatico.ca



-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Patterson <mpatters at OregonVOS.net>
To: tweeters <tweeters at u.washington.edu>
Date: Friday, January 29, 1999 8:46 PM
Subject: RFI: Snowy Owls the 1973 irruption


>I was going through Snowy Owl records on CBC's in preparation for the Snowy
>Owl account in the new Birds of Oregon book being put together and
discovered
>the following numbers for the 1973 irruption:
>
> Bellingham 32
> Grays Harbor 25
> Leadbetter Pt 23
> Padilla Bay 79
>
>I remember that year. I saw my first Snowy Owl on the Tillamook Bay Count
>in Oregon (one of 8), but 79... good golly.
>
>What was that like? were they sitting on top of one another? Can I get a
>confirmation on these numbers?
>
>--
>Mike Patterson I don't swear for the hell of it.
>Astoria, OR Language is a poor enough means of
>communication and
>mpatters at orednet.org we've got to use all the words we've got....
> Besides, there are damn few words anybody
understands
> Henry Drummond in "Inherit the Wind"
>
>http://www.pacifier.com/~mpatters/bird/bird.html
>