Where Do Snowy Owls Live? Arctic Home and Winter Range

The breeding range: Arctic tundra

In summer the snowy owl is a bird of the high Arctic. Its breeding range circles the North Pole and includes:

• North America: the North Slope of Alaska, around Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow), and the Canadian Arctic from Yukon and the Northwest Territories to Nunavut and northern Quebec, including islands such as Bylot and Victoria.
• Greenland, mainly in the north and northeast.
• Europe: the mountains and tundra of northern Norway, Sweden and Finland, where breeding is irregular and rare in most years.
• Russia: the tundra of the Kola Peninsula, Yamal, Taimyr, Chukotka and Arctic islands such as Wrangel Island.

Snowy owls choose open, rolling tundra with low mounds, ridges or boulders. These rises give the female a dry, snow-free nest site and a wide view over the surrounding land. They avoid forest entirely, so the breeding range stops roughly where the trees begin.

Nomads that follow the lemmings

Snowy owls do not have a fixed home in the way most birds do. Their main summer food is lemmings, small rodents whose numbers rise and crash every few years. Each spring, owls search widely and settle where lemmings are plentiful. Satellite tracking in the Canadian Arctic has shown female owls covering more than 1,000 km (620 mi) while looking for a place to nest.

As a result, a site that holds dozens of nesting pairs one year may have none the next. In poor lemming years many snowy owls do not breed at all. This nomadic lifestyle makes them very hard to count, which is one reason their population was overestimated for decades; see Are snowy owls endangered?

Where do snowy owls go in winter?

Snowy owl movements in winter are varied:

• Some stay in the Arctic. Satellite tags have shown adult owls spending the winter far north, hunting seabirds and ducks at open water among the sea ice in places such as Hudson Bay and the Bering Sea.
• Many move to the northern prairies and plains. The Canadian Prairies and the northern Great Plains of the United States are a regular wintering area, where the owls hunt voles and other rodents in fields.
• Others reach coasts and lakes. Coastal marshes, beaches and dunes from British Columbia and Washington to the Atlantic coast of New England, and the ice of the Great Lakes, attract wintering owls.
• In Eurasia, snowy owls winter on the steppes and open country of southern Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and northern China, and occasionally reach northern Japan.

Adults generally stay farther north than young birds, which make up most of the owls seen far to the south.

Why do snowy owls turn up at airports and beaches?

Snowy owls look for places that feel like home: flat, open land with a wide view and plenty of small mammals. Large airports are ideal. Their grassy fields hold voles, rats and rabbits, and the long runways and open ground resemble tundra. Boston’s Logan International Airport has had wintering snowy owls almost every year.

This creates a risk for both birds and aircraft. At Logan, Mass Audubon researchers have captured, banded and moved hundreds of snowy owls since the early 1980s, releasing them in safer open country away from the runways. Some owls return in later winters, and one bird banded there came back 16 years later.

Beaches and coastal dunes are popular for similar reasons. Jones Beach on Long Island, New York, and Boundary Bay in British Columbia are well-known places where snowy owls rest and hunt during winter.

Irruptions: when snowy owls come far south

In some winters, far more snowy owls appear in the south than usual. These irruptions usually follow a summer with lots of lemmings, when many chicks were raised. The young owls, competing with adults for winter hunting spots, move much farther south.

Irruption years have brought snowy owls to Kentucky, Georgia and the Carolinas in the United States, and in Europe to Britain, Germany and the Netherlands. The winter of 2013–2014 produced one of the largest irruptions on record in eastern North America, and led to the Project SNOWstorm tracking program.

Do snowy owls live in Europe?

Yes, but in small numbers. They breed irregularly in the mountains and tundra of northern Norway, Sweden and Finland and in Arctic Russia, and in most of Europe they are rare winter visitors. In Britain they are best known from the pair that bred on Fetlar in Shetland between 1967 and 1975, and since then from occasional winter wanderers. Britain’s resident owls are covered in owls in the UK.

How to see a snowy owl responsibly

Winter is the best time for most people to see a snowy owl. Look over wide-open places such as coastal dunes, lake shores, prairie fields and the edges of airports, scanning for a pale shape on a mound, fence post or roof. Many owls are found by watching for a “lump of snow” that turns its head.

Owls in winter need to rest and save energy. Watch from a distance, use binoculars or a telescope, stay on paths, and move away if the owl starts staring at you, shifting or flying off. Never bait owls with food. Other species to look for are described in owls of North America.