On the morning of February 6, 2022, I drove about an hour east of my home to meet my sister to look for Snowy Owls. Finding Snowy Owls was on my list of goals for this winter. I had also wanted to try and photograph Great Gray Owls this winter, but I have not been successful yet. The conditions in town were warm and dry when I left, but by the time I got about 30 miles out of town the roads turned very icy. I am not sure if it was new snowfall overnight that froze or if it was blowing snow that had recovered the roads. I had to slow down, but I still made it to our designated meeting location on time without issue.
We were probably looking for about a half an hour when my sister spotted our first snowy owl. It was on the edge of a stubble field not far off the road we were traveling on. I would guess we were probably still about 100 yards away when she spotted it. With it being so close to the road, we did not want to scare it, so we stopped and I took a few stills and some video from the car. It was too far away to realistically get any good photos, but we were not sure how long it would stick around, so I figured I better at least get a few pictures for documentation if nothing else. I was shooting with my Canon R5 and my Canon 600mm F4 II. I forgot my extender, or I might have considered putting it on. After we watched it for a while we decided to see if we could get any closer. The owl was along the road we needed to travel along anyway, so we figured it was worth taking a chance by getting a little closer. We were able to get a little bit closer, but it ended up flying away while we were still pretty far away. It did not fly real far, but it was still too far away for good photography. We continued down the road a little farther and we stopped to look around a little bit and I spotted a 2nd snowy owl sitting on the railroad tracks. This owl was even farther away than the first. So we just observed it with our binoculars for a while.
Snowy Owl on the edge of a field.
Slightly different pose of the first Snowy Owl we saw along the road.
I had already been out unsuccessfully a couple of times this winter looking for Snowy Owls, so to see two owls in less than an hour was really awesome. I was a little disappointed we had not been able to find one closer though. We continued to look around the countryside and after a little while we stumbled upon a third owl that was sitting out in the middle of a field. This owl was also too far away for any good photographs. When we first saw it, we were not 100% sure if it was one of the first owls we saw that had moved, or if it was a third. After we watched this owl for a while, we decided to go back and check where we saw the first two. Sure enough, those two owls were still where we left them, so we could confirm we had seen 3 Snowy owls.
Snowy Owl perched on an old fence.
Snowy Owl in flight.
Eventually we decided that the owls were not going to cooperate and give us any closer views so we decided to call it a day. We did not want to harass the birds by trying to get too close. Seeing three Snowy Owls in one morning was still an awesome experience and I was able to cross off one of my winter goals. Hopefully the owls will stick around a little bit longer so I can get a chance to try again for some better pictures. All of the photographs and video were cropped to try and showcase the birds. As a result they are not very high resolution. As the morning went on (it was abnormally warm for February) I was starting to get some heat distortion in my pictures as well, which further degraded the image quality. Since the owls were white, there were white patches of snow in many of the scenes and the sky was relatively bright I was shooting with between 2/3 and a full stop of positive exposure compensation to correct my exposures.
Snowy Owl landing on a fence.
Slightly different pose of the Snowy Owl perched on the fence.
Besides the owls, we saw many pronghorn antelope, white-tail deer and I briefly saw what I think was a coyote. All in all it was an awesome morning.
White-tail deer amongst some old farm equipment.
Pronghorn Antelope.
A young buck pronghorn antelope on the run.
As I mentioned, I was hoping to photograph Great Gray Owls this winter too. I found this one (along with a couple of others) in the fall, but I only had my cheap camera with me at the time, so this blurry picture was the best I could do. I was hoping to get back into that area with my better equipment, but I got snowed out. I had not previously posted this picture, so I thought I would include it on this post.