2mo ago

Photographer Captures Snowy Owl with Orange Plumage That Has Confused Scientists

petapixel.com Photographer Captures Snowy Owl with Orange Plumage That Has Confused Scientists

Why is it that color?

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/23890081

petapixel.com /2025/03/28/photographer-julie-maggert-captures-snowy-owl-with-orange-plumage-that-has-confused-scientists/

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Be sure to catch up on our around the clock coverage to get some supposition on the source of this superbly stained specimen during its strange sub-arctic sebatical!
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Orange Snowy Likely to Remain a Mystery Forever
One of a kind' reddish snowy owl appears to be returning to 'normal'
- Eh i see superb owl i crosspost. I am a simple person
  
  I hope this was not taken as me giving a "use the search" Reddit type response. Just providing further context for anyone jumping into this story and to give somewhat of an answer as to what happened to the owl. I gave the same post on Blaze's post for anyone that found that one first.
- We'll probably know exactly where and how it got spray painted safety orange as soon as people follow it back to it's summer location and see like an orange bridge or something.
  
  I was surprised nobody else really photographed it other than the one lady. Would have been nice to get a leg band or GPS on it too.
  
  Also, I guess I don't know enough to say for sure that it will return near enough to exactly where it used to be. Is that typical migration habit for snowy owls?
  
  Snowy migration is a bit irregular. They don't even always do it every year. Sometimes they'll go to/from the same place, but not always. They're nomads and just kind of follow food around.
  They get studied a good bit, including by Project SNOWstorm, which tracks Snowies specifically. Lots of work is being done to find out who goes where, when, and why.
  Owls are really fun because they're an animal we feel we should know a lot about (who doesn't know what at least 1 owl looks like?), but since they hate people, try to be invisible, live in hard to get places, and mainly travel at night by flying, they've been really hard to track and study historically, so there is still so much we have to learn about them compared to many animals we're familiar with. More taditional methods like banding are still a great source of info, but now we have better cameras, drones, gps, night vision, and computers. Even things like BirdNET Pi can help find these invisible but vocal animals. It's a great time to be an owl fan!

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