Hunting for Hedwig

I consider myself a bird watcher. I have multiple feeders in my backyard and am able to recognize many birds. When I'm outside, it's usually birds that catch my attention. But I'm not one of those "must travel to the ends of the earth to add a bird to my life list" birders. I don't have a life list.

Today, that changed a little. I'd seen a couple of reports that snowy owls have been spotted around the state. Looking up where they've been seen, I noticed a lot of reports from here - in Dakota County. With them being this close, I wanted to go hunting for a snowy owl. My sister, brother-in-law, niece and I headed south on Highway 52. For the next couple of hours, we looked for owls and tried to locate geocaches in the area, too.

Near the intersection of 180th St. E. and Emery Avenue, we saw a car pulled to the side of the road. A man got out with a spotting scope so we pulled over, too and asked if he'd spotted "one." He knew exactly what I was asking about and sure enough, there in the middle of a cornfield was a snowy owl. There was no way I'd have known what it was without looking through the spotting scope. Their camouflage is amazing - they look just like a blob of snow. So in a snowfield, they are unrecognizable. Thank goodness for spotting scopes.

The gentleman with the scope was very generous. After he let all of us look at the owl, he told us where there was another owl. Birders are nice people.

It was easy to know where to stop for the second bird - there were about six cars lined up along the road. The owl was perched on top of a transmission tower. As we watched, it flew from that tower to the next tower over. How exciting to not just see a snowy owl, but to also get to see one fly.

I tried to take pictures, but 1) need a much bigger telephoto lens, and 2) need to improve my technique of photographing a white bird against white clouds and/or snow. (Let's just say my pictures didn't turn out.) Oh well, maybe that means I need to go back and look for more snowy owls...