This waxwing breeds in the northwestern portion of the continent, and in some winters moves great distances, from Alaska to as far as southern New England. Look for them feeding on ornamental crab-apple trees in your city or town. (This one is eating my high-bush cranberries.) The best field mark to distinguish Bohemian Waxwing from Cedar Waxwing are the rusty undertail feathers on Bohemian (creamy white in Cedar). In any event, I find Bohemian Waxwing to be among our most elegant winter birds.

Here’s an interactive map of Bohemian Waxwing sightings since January 1. When it comes up, click on the “Show Points Sooner” box to the right for a better view of locations.

Blogger’s Note: Here’s one of my articles now making the rounds in Vermont newspapers.

By Bryan Pfeiffer
© In This State
ADDISON, VT – A snowy owl usually appears indifferent. Sitting on a fencepost along a barren cornfield, it is a bird without country or concern. Driving snow and vicious winds don’t matter. You don’t matter either. A snowy owl doesn’t care that you’ve driven halfway across Vermont to see a bird. A snowy owl doesn’t even know you exist. Or if it does know, it doesn’t really give a hoot about you anyway.

So you stand there next to the car among birdwatchers, hands and feet already frozen, peering through binoculars at a creature that has flown here from someplace dreadfully colder than Vermont. Out there in its field the owl is languid, a frosty statue lazy to the world. Or so it seems. Then a birdwatcher coughs, or curses the wind-chill, and the owl spins its head.

At that moment a snowy owl will change your life.

Its eyes, lemon-yellow laser beams, make you melt. They spring open and glisten from a fluffy white expression. In a single glance, the owl says, “I’ve seen icy places you can only imagine. Now go about your business, go lead your dreary life. I’ve got rodents to kill here.”

Snowy owls are offering passing glances to many Vermonters this winter. The arctic birds have descended on the state in unusually high numbers, turning up in a few strange places: on a brick chimney in Brattleboro, during a Christmas party in Colchester or on a garden gazebo in Panton. Addison County seems to be the epicenter of the owl sightings. For bundled up birdwatchers, the hard-core and the incidental alike, the owl invasion is among this winter’s great natural events. 

One of those birders is Ian Worley, a retired professor of environmental studies at the University of Vermont. For some birdwatchers, chasing a white owl can be like Ahab pursuing his whale (the obsession without the revenge motive). But Worley, who now prefers to observe nature close to home in Cornwall, has been discovering snowy owls during his routine outings around Addison County. In his finding and discussing these owls, Worley blends biology, morality and concern for a warming planet.

“Everyone has encountered a snowy owl, in children’s stories, in movies, somewhere,” says Worley, graying and ruddy with a ruggedness that defies his 70 years. “All that weight of culture rides with this remarkable, charismatic oddity: an owl that you can see during the day! Yet not many have seen it.”

A snowy owl is an icon of icy places. It breeds in some of the coldest climate on earth, in an arctic band around the planet’s cap. Conventional wisdom holds that when its primary food supply, lemmings, undergoes a population crash, snowy owls, particularly young birds, are forced south in search of replacement rodents. But new research suggests snowy owls also can move south when food supplies are abundant. Lots of food may mean that lots of owls survive until winter, at which point the adults chase younger birds from the better feeding areas. Outcompeted for turf, the youngsters wander to northern states. This winter they are turning up from coast to coast.

Even so, snowy owls are tough to spot. A banner winter like this one has produced only about two-dozen sightings in Vermont since Sheryl Larson noted the first snowy on Nov. 24 while walking the Colchester Causeway into Lake Champlain. More owls almost certainly await discovery.

It is not unusual to find snowy owls near water. Many of the North American discoveries are along or near coastlines. Snowy owls certainly prefer small land mammals, which they hear beneath the snowpack or sight with acuity before dispatching them with sharp talons and then swallowing the prey headfirst. But they’ll also take what’s locally abundant, including small ducks or even fish snatched from the water’s surface. The breakwater on Burlington’s waterfront has attracted snowy owls in the past.

Rotarians aren’t necessarily known as birdwatchers, at least not most Rotarians. But the Colchester-Milton Rotary Club got an owl visit during its Christmas party at Carol MacDonald’s house along the Winooski River in Colchester. One guest happened to look out the window to see a huge owl land in a cottonwood along the river. It stayed there a bit, then launched and flew a loop on broad wings. “It was very dramatic,” says MacDonald. And then with a laugh she added: “Nature at its best!”

When it does appear, a snowy owl might favor a particular perch for weeks on end. Other times, it is a one-day wonder, a phantom that frustrates birdwatchers who arrive a day too late.

Pat Folsom and her friend Pat Allen were a day late for a snowy owl that had been visiting the Button Bay area last month. Or so they thought. They were about to call it quits when Folsom decided to drive Slang Road in Panton, which leads from farmland into yet more farmland. They drove past a small wetland and climbed a gentle rise to find a gnarly roadside maple. Perched on a branch was their owl.

“You can never get enough of a snowy owl, can you?” says Folsom, who lives in Fayston but pursues birds with dedication far beyond Vermont. “How far they’ve traveled to get here. It’s amazing to think about the journey.”

What motivates Worley, whose resume reads like an encyclopedia of ecology, including research in Alaska’s Glacier Bay, are the mysteries of nature nearby. He spotted more than 230 bird species within a 40-minute drive from Cornwall last year.

Living in Addison County, among its wetlands and farmland, Worley is at ease among duck hunters and farmers. A bald eagle is enough to get anyone’s heart pumping. Most duck hunters enjoy seeing eagles soaring over Lake Champlain, and are eager to tell Worley of the experience. But snowy owls are another matter.

“You can’t go to a snowy owl lookout,” Worley says. “The snowy owl just appears. It doesn’t arrive by wing. It just appears.”

When one does appear, and Worley is fortunate enough to find it, he is exchanging glances, close to his home, with an unwitting messenger from far away. Like the polar bear, the snow leopard and other charismatic species, the snowy owl is intrinsic to our collective subconscious, “a reminiscence,” as Worley puts it, of the Arctic, its extreme wonder and its value. “It’s a connection to a place,” he says, “that is never, never taken from you.”

So whether Vermonters see it or not, a visiting snowy owl has the capacity to connect the land and people in this state to the tundra and wildlife of the Arctic. If we care about climate change and the loss of tundra and the ice pack, Worley says, he would pick the snowy owl to help tell the story.

“It carries the knowledge of the Arctic and where we are,” he says. “The Arctic is its home. We are its home. It has one home.”

The herring gull, one of our most cosmopolitan bird species, thrives in picnic areas or parking lots, at farms or fast-food joints, at sea or in sewage lagoons. The ivory gull (right), the embodiment of white, breeds as far north as any bird. And across the planet, not from the Antarctic Peninsula, the kelp gull can gouge and eat blubber from the backs of surfacing southern right whales.

Gulls are nothing if not resourceful. About 50 species inhabit the planet. Here in the Northeast we are fortunate to find at least a dozen, including rarities from the arctic, Europe, or Asia. So perhaps you may be asking yourself, “Is this guy actually trying to get me to watch gulls?” Warblers? Sure. Thrushes? Fine. Sparrows? Maybe. But gulls?

Yeah, gulls. 

Hey, this is winter, after all. The warblers and thrushes and sparrows have left us like lovers scorned. Silent is the dawn chorus. Faded are the sparks of songbird color. Gulls, gliding in on frosty winds, stoic out on the ice, beckon like sparkling snow on a sunny day. (By the way, please do not call them seagulls; it’s an inaccurate term for gulls, even for those spending much of their lives at sea.)

Although many species have adapted to human habitats, their ability to exploit seas, freshwater coastal zones and inland sites make gulls an evolutionary success story. They are widespread and peripatetic, and therefore relatively secure on planet Earth. Gulls are sociable, nesting and foraging in groups. They’re also smart. Our rather common herring gull, for example, has been reported to drop pieces of bread in water as bait for catching fish. It’s one thing for a gull to drop a mussel on a rock to crack it open; it’s a bigger deal when a bird uses easy food as a tool to secure a better meal.

Gulls are elegant in flight and, because they are fairly tame, easy to observe. But many birders avoid gulls, or wish they would just fly away. One reason for the “Lariphobia” (gulls belong to the family Laridae) is that gulls present some of the greatest identification challenges in birding. Many species take three or four years to reach their definitive adult plumage, which is usually a tidy combination of white, gray, and black. During each of those youthful years, however, gulls show stages of brown mottling, which also varies seasonally from summer to winter. The result is that some gull species can show eight different plumages. To the novice, it’s like identifying snowflakes. But fear not: here is some basic advice for the bewildered gull-watcher.

First is “age before beauty.” If you’re new to this game, begin by watching the adults, which show no brown or gray mottling other than streaks on the head in winter. The shape, color, and markings on the bill also help in identification. So does leg color. Relative overall size can be useful and so can head shape.

Also, know that you will be less likely to discover the rare gull unless you first recognize the common species.  So here’s what you must know about adult plumages of the Northeast’s three most common gulls.

• The herring gull has a clean white body and tail, a uniform gray upper-side, black wingtips with white spots, an orange dot on a yellow bill, and pink legs.
• The ring-billed gull looks like a smaller version of the herring gull, except that it has (fittingly) a black ring around its small yellow bill. Its legs are yellow.
• The great black-backed gull – the largest gull in the world – looks a bit like a herring gull, except that its upper-side is black (not gray like most other gulls).

From here your birdwatching will expand through a winter of possibilities. Gulls offer some of the best evidence that nature is a lifelong learning experience. And if you happen to bump into a hungry kelp gull, keep your shirt on and watch your back.

DATES: First Mondays of the month (with a few exceptions) from 6:30-8:00pm. This month’s bonus session is TONIGHT: Getting Gulls (yeah, gulls), January 9, at 6:30pm in Montpelier.

LOCATION: First Baptist Church of Montpelier, a block down School Street from the Kellogg-Hubbard Library. Here’s a map.

FEE: $10 per session

“CURRICULUM:” Here’s your syllabus.

The Better Birding series is co-sponsored by the Vermont Center for Ecostudies and the North Branch Nature Center.

• In Panton in the area of Slang and West Road on December 23. (Thanks, Pat Folsom and Pat Allen.)
• In Panton at Spaulding Bay at the end of Turkey Lane on December 22. (Thanks, Jim Mead.)
• In Shoreham at the junction of Whiting-Shoreham Road and Webster Road on December 22. (Thanks, Shelagh Smith.)

There’s certainly a hot-spot of sightings in the central Champlain Valley (my little map to the right) of Vermont and New York. And the Massachusetts coast has been fairly reliable as well. Here’s the interactive eBird Snowy Owl map. When you get to the map, click on the “Show Points Sooner” box to the right for the best view of locations. You’ll find a list of all my Snowy Owl updates here.

Another Snowy at Button Island was visible with a scope from around Button Bay State Park in Ferrisburg. It was last seen on December 10, when Ian Worley reported: “It has been in a tree at the north end of the island and on a rock on the shore beneath the tree. It can be seen from the fishing access parking lot area, but for better looks walk down to the hub of the park and view from the overlook or somewhere on the shore.” Note that you can walk into state parks while they’re closed for the winter, but don’t block the gates when you park.

Finally, I also have a report from December 9, as of yet unconfirmed, from Taylor Hill Road and Rte 14, in the town of Brookfield.

You can find all my Snowy Owl blog posts here. Onward!

In case you missed it, here’s my Vermont Public Radio interview on the Snowy situation. And here’s my initial Snowy Owl Alert about this winter’s invasion.