Arctic Science Journeys
Radio Script
1997

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Snowy Owls
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STORY: Ukpaigvik is an Inupiaq Eskimo word for the northern Alaska community of Barrow. Roughly translated, it means, "the place to hunt snowy owls." It's a place aptly named, for within a few miles of this remote town on the edge of the Arctic Ocean are hundreds of snowy owls. While hunters no longer seek them for food and clothing, snowy owls do attract the attention of scientists. Denver Holt is the president of the Owl Research Institute in Missoula, Montana.

HOLT: "I enjoy owls. Period. Not only as a research topic but as a fascinating animal. Some of the neat things about snowy owls up in Barrow for instance is that these birds are certainly a circumpolar bird, they are found throughout the Arctic region of the North Pole."

In the world of the snowy owl, nothing is more important than the brown lemming, a mouse-like rodent that is the owl's favorite food. Scientists believe the owl's reproductive cycle is loosely tied to lemming abundance. Robert Sudan is a government biologist in Barrow.

SUDAN: "The adult snowy owls only nest at times and in places where lemming populations are high enough so that there's enough food for both the adults and chicks. And so in some years there can be hundreds of snowy owl pairs nesting in a really, really small area. And that again is because of the high numbers of lemming."

Scientists are only now discovering just how far snowy owls will fly to find lemmings and successfully raise their young. The owl institute's Denver Holt:

HOLT: "It happened about a year and a half or two years ago, on our study area near Barrow, where we had a snowy owl that was injured and an Eskimo guy brought it in and it had a weird marker on its wing. It was a piece of copper pushed through the fleshy part of the wing with some rubber wrapped around the wing and a little patch on it. And we tracked that marker down to the Russians. The marker was inserted as that young was in the nest, and it showed up in our study area. So it flew from Wrangell Island, Russia, across the Arctic Ocean to Barrow, Alaska, and was there during the breeding season. That gives you an idea that the owls do seem to move around."

SUDAN: "Sometimes they'll show up in places like Washington and Oregon, and I know that occasionally they're found even further south than that. They've shown up in California on the West Coast before, and I know on the East Coast they've also shown up quite a ways south. So what we think happens is that there's lots of snowy owls, especially these young snowy owls, and either they have a hard time finding food in the fall or the winter, or there are just too many owls out there for the land to support. And so they just move further and further south looking for food."

Ultimately, the snowy owl's roaming nature means Arctic nations will eventually need to adopt an international approach to their study and protection. Already, Holt has begun to make contacts with researchers in Greenland and in Russia to learn more about these nomadic hunters of the far north.

For Arctic Science Journeys, this is Debra Damron reporting from Fairbanks, Alaska.