Arctic snowy owls may be preparing for another irruption into the US

© SEAN SIMMERS

A snowy owl sits in the grass in a courtyard at Cedar Cliff High School in Camp Hill. . Sean Simmers, PennLive.com. November 25, 2014

Cedar Cliff High School in Camp Hill was visited Tuesday by a snowy owl, one of several of the Arctic birds that have shown up in Pennsylvania in recent days.

The large, mostly white birds may be the precursors of a repeat of last winter's mass invasion into Pennsylvania and several other states.

Scott Weidensaul, one of the owl researchers who organized the Project SNOWStorm banding and radio-tracking effort in response to last winter's record-setting irruption by snowies, said already this year owls have been spotted in the Gratz Valley of northern Dauphin County, near Morgantown in Berks County, on Presque Isle in Lake Erie and "a bunch on the coast."

Dozens of additional snowy owls have been reported throughout the Northeast, around the Great Lakes, and as far south as Illinois and Maryland.

Owl watchers initially thought the region might be seeing the start of an echo irruption, which sees older snowies that irrupted the previous year making another foray to the south, he explained, but more recent evidence indicates a "whole new irruption of young owls" making their first visits to Pennsylvania and other states may be shaping up for this winter.

Jean-Francois Therrien, senior research biologist in charge of Hawk Mountain Sanctuary's research projects in the Arctic, and others documented "record breeding" on Bylot Island in the High Arctic this summer, according to Weidensaul, who speculated that it "could be the same dynamic as last year," although it's too early to be sure.

And, on the Project SnowStorm blog, he noted some differences already emerging this year from last. "The first indication of last winter's irruption was the appearance of hundreds of snowy owls in Newfoundland, weeks before they showed up in numbers farther south. This winter, there's been nary an owl seen in Newfoundland. And the irruption zone extends farther west, into North Dakota."

He said none of the birds spotted this year were any of the 22 fitted with tags last winter by Project SNOWStorm, which plans to tag at least seven to 10 additional snowies this year.

Some have speculated that the owl that showed up in the internal courtyard at Cedar Cliff may be injured or otherwise impaired, given its choice of a sheltered resting spot and the appearance of its eyes. However, the bird flew off before any wildlife rehabilitators arrived for a closer look.