ONE TO WATCH
Now you see me...
Spilling out of the pages of a field guide, the Snowy Owl is unmistakable; a bulky, bril-
liantly white bird of prey, staring you down with its piercing golden eyes. But if you were
a lemming trying to survive another night on the unforgiving Arctic tundra, you likely
wouldn’t see sight nor sound of this ghost-like hunter until it was too late. The Snowy
Owl is a widespread Arctic predator, haunting open areas across both North America
and Eurasia. A highly nomadic species, it shifts from area to area as food availability
dictates. But this transient nature poses a challenge for conservationists attempting
to pin down the species’ threat status. We know that the species is currently under-
going high rates of population decline, particularly in North America, where vehicle
collisions, entanglement in fishing equipment and illegal hunting have all conspired to
thin numbers. But is the worldwide Snowy Owl population robust enough to survive
these threats in the short term? We’ve long thought so, but new methodologies used
to estimate the global population have returned far lower numbers than we’ve previ-
ously been working with – in some cases as low as 14,000 pairs. Furthermore, recent
rates of decline may well prove to be enough to warrant BirdLife uplisting the species
from Least Concern to globally Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. Follow the fate of the
Snowy Owl and many other at-risk species on BirdLife International’s Globally Threat-
ened Bird Forums, a hotpot of ideas and data where some of the world’s leading orni-
thologists are currently debating this year’s proposed Red List status changes.
www.birdlife.org/globally-threatened-bird-forums
SNOWY OWL Bubo scandiacus
Photo by FOTOREQUEST/SHUTTERSTOCK