Thanks, Glenn, for pointing us toward this excellent video (question: how recently did this come out?). Just yesterday I received my Audubon magazine for March/April, with, among other interesting articles, a major one on this year's Snowy irruption on the East Coast, and including some research data that is now being generated from a variety of sources. I believe Dan Reiff recommended this issue a while back. One of you Tweets noticed, in a Wash. Post article on this subject, that NO mention was made of the irruption winters we had here in 2011 & 2012, and I noticed the same thing in this Audubon article. Maybe it is, as the Tweet suggested, an "East Coast media bias". I'm thinking that perhaps it could also be that no or little serious scientific data was collected during our West Coast experience. Any thoughts on this? Maybe it would be worth contacting and asking Saul Weidensaul, the author of both articles, about this issue. Certainly there was awareness of our recent West Coast Snowy Owl phenomena?...
I'm sure that at least some of what Paul Bannick has observed, photographed and learned, as shared in this video, should be a welcome addition to the combined data bank on these owls, along with observations of others, whether scientists, citizen scientists, birders, photographers, 'regular' citizens. There is a lot of movement and fund-raising afoot to follow the movements of some of the owls with radio transmitters, e.g. Project SNOWstorm - for more info and updates, see the Audubon article and the project website: projectsnowstorm.org
Let's combine our resources and help all of us learn more about these appealing and fascinating "Messengers from the Arctic". Data-exclusivity seems counter to real progress in advancing our knowledge-base of birds and our environments. What with all of the tools we now have available to us to more quickly and competently learn more about the inevitably-interacting parts of nature I hope that we can continue to minimize competition and instead embrace more collaboration between all of the species that exist here together on this earth. Our fate is in all our hands.
I'd love to end this message with a bit of humor, like: "What did the Snowy Owl say to the lemming?" - problem is I can't come up with a quick finish to this joke. :-) Feel free to submit a humorous answer or your own topical bit of humor. It's one of the necessary ingredients to survival of the human species, don't you think?

Barb Deihl
North Matthews Beach - NE Seattle
barbdeihl at comcast.net