A war between birders and residents is brewing over the Discovery Park Snowy Owl. This from today’s Tweeters:
Yesterday was not a great day at Discovery if you are grading the relationship between birders and the folks living in military housing units. Many people were completely ignoring the signs about trespassing and walking right up to people's houses to see the owl. The residents resorted to shooing the owl away twice in order to get their privacy back.....unfortunately this owl seems to "hide" higher up on the houses....which in turns draws the people closer so that they can see better. I want to clarify that every single person who disobeyed these signs and caused problems were what I would call non birders. They just happened to be walking by and saw the commotion. I talked with 1 homeowner last night at dusk and he was really frustrated. He and his family really enjoyed the Owl and he fully appreciates the rarity and curiosity that this Arctic visitor brings. However, he does not understand why people are walking onto his porch, blocking his driveway with their cars and ignorantly parking on their street causing the recycling trucks and school buses to not be able to drive up to their houses and do their jobs or deliver their children safely to their homes. PLEASE respect the rights of these people! Yesterday they discussed removing the bird from the park to avoid this problem in the future and after they had flushed this bird 2 times yesterday it actually left the park to the North for an hour or so.
If it seems like we have a lot of owls this winter, consider this posting from Gene Hunn:
For us old timers the banner year was the winter of 1973-1974. On a day trip to the Skagit in March of 1974 I counted 54 Snowies (which seems to indicate that many if not most survive the winter quite well, thank you) and there were as many as 7 at one time on the roof of Hec Edmondson Pavilion on the UW campus plus a high count of 120+ on the Ladner BC Christmas Bird Count.
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