But the next day, as he and two students hiked a narrow canyon in the Chuckwalla Mountains of southern California, he had an epiphany. For three winters the bird returned to that spot, hibernating through early March. The news stunned the scientific world but not the Hopi Indians. On our frozen beaches and marshes, on bitter, wind-blasted prairies, at large metropolitan airports, and in any habitat vaguely reminiscent of tundra, North America's heaviest owl finds winter refuge from the even more brutal cold of its breeding grounds. In normal years the northern tier of our contiguous states is its sunny south.
Flights are heaviest when the lemming population has crashed in the far north.
Unlike most owls, this one often hunts by day because it raises its young in a land where summer night, if it occurs at all, is fleeting as the blush of wildflowers. Over surrogate tundra south of the Canadian border or real tundra in the high Arctic, the snowy owl floats like the angel of death, swooping down to talon rodents and swallow them headfirst. Send a letter to the editor about this piece.