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Distribution
Figure 1. Breeding and wintering distribution of Snowy Owls in North America.
Aou Check-List Region
Breeding Range
Fig. 1 . In North America in the w. Aleutians (Attu, Buldir), Hall Island (Bering Sea), and from n. Alaska and throughout the Canadian Arctic Islands south to coastal w. Alaska (Hooper Bay), n. Yukon, n. Mackenzie, s. Keewatin, ne. Manitoba (Churchill), n. Quebec and n. Labrador.
Winter Range
Fig. 1 . From breeding range in North America south to s. Canada and n. United States, sporadically as far south as central California and the Gulf states from Texas to Florida. Also recorded in Bermuda. (See Populations: population status.)
Range Outside Aou Check-List Region
Breeding Range
From n. Greenland, n. Scandinavia, n. Russia, s. Novaya Zemlya, and n. Siberia south to the limits of tundra in Eurasia and the Commander Islands. Rarely in British Isles. (See Cramp 1985 for details).
Winter Range
Irregularly from breeding range south to Iceland, British Isles, n. continental Europe, central Russia, n. China, and Sakhalin. Accidental in the Azores, Mediterranean region, Iran, nw. India and Japan.
Fossil History
An owl from the late Miocene of Italy, the size of the modern Snowy Owl and provisionally named Strix perpasta, may represent an extinct genus (Olson 1985); not clear if it is related to the Snowy Owl. Nyctea scandiaca remains have been recovered from prehistoric Pleistocene deposits in North America in Alaska (Cape Prince of Wales), Little Kiska Island, St. Lawrence Island, and Illinois (Brodkorb 1971); also from European prehistoric sites: England, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria, and Hungary. An extinct, somewhat stronger and more robust Snowy Owl, with 2% longer and 6% thicker long bones than the present-day owl, is known only from glacial deposits in s. France; described by C. Mourer-Chauviré as Nyctea scandiaca gallica (Voous 1989).
Paleolithic people of Europe used owls as subjects in their cave art. The outline of a pair of Snowy Owls and their chicks was etched into the rock face of a cave, Les Trois Frères, Ariège, France, at a time when the Arctic climate extended farther south than today and rendered much of France suitable as a breeding ground (Burton 1973). Evidently the Snowy Owl is the oldest bird species recognizable in prehistoric cave art (P. Stettenheim pers. comm.).
Parmelee, David F. 1992. Snowy Owl (Bubo scandiacus), The Birds of North America Online (A. Poole, Ed.). Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Retrieved from the Birds of North America Online: http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/species/010
