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. 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. 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. 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.