I took a short road trip to Traverse City this week to see my sister Karen for Christmas. I was watching the weather forecast for a day with out any snow, Tuesday looked perfect, but it still ended up SNOWY.
Northern Michigan is experiencing a large flock of migrating snowy owls, known as an irruption. This year the area has numbers unlike anything seen in recent years.
Karen is subscribed to a group in the area that sends out email notices of wildlife sightings. She received a lot of snowy owl sightings in the last week and was hoping we would have the chance to photograph some on my visit.
After I arrived and we had a chance to catch up on things we decided it was time to head out and look for some snowy owls. She told me there had been some sightings close to her condo and as we turned the corner and looked out across the field we saw someone standing in the middle of the field with a camera on a tripod.
We didn’t see anything, but as we drove around the corner we viewed something down in the gulley. Karen turned the car around and I hopped out and made my way across the field. Sitting on an old split rail fence was a snowy owl. I took a few (hundred) pictures and then we went to another area close by.
As we drove down along a ballpark we spotted a few cars pulled off the side street. We saw several people photographing something. This time it was a large female. We spent at least an hour watching and photographing the owl.
The snowy owl really didn’t seem to care about much of anything that was going on around it. Cars were passing close by, people were photography it, finally it flew off to a snow bank close by. We moved closer and shot another set of photographs of the bird.
It was getting way past lunchtime, we packed up our gear and headed out for a nice lunch. We sat and talked about our morning experience and how nice it was to spend the day together.
It was a perfect SNOWY day!
Merry Christmas Sis…
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