Bad Time To Be A Vole In Seattle (as if there's a good time or place to be a vole)

This Snowy Owl has been doing the town lately and has been spotted in a number of places including Discovery Park and Capitol Hill where he was captured on film by an alert flickr user. Every couple of years Snowy Owls will migrate south from their hood in northern Alaska when it gets particularly cold (it's -36° in Barrow right now, which is cold compared to the 55° our apartment was this morning after the furnace puked, yeah, but not particularly cold for Barrow) or when the vole and lemming populations dry up. Still, Washington is at the very bottom of its known range.

So if you can tear yourself away from observing the varied speices of cigarette butts in the street and look skyward for the next couple of weeks you might see this thing. We're not suggesting you buy any field guides, binoculars, or vests or start telling people you're going "birding" next weekend, but you should keep an eye out.

Image courtesy of Laurel Fan