On the hunt for a (first) snowy owl in Racine County’s Tichigan marsh
WISCO 100: This is the second in a series of reports on 100 outdoor adventures across Wisconsin, spanning every corner of the state and embracing the broadest possible definition of adventure.
Thorny brambles nagged at my jeans and coat as I fought my way through a thicket of hope and befuddlement. I had just seen a large bird soar over the leafless, skeletal trees of the Tichigan Wildlife Area north of Waterford.
Could this bird be the one?
Still undetermined. Edging toward unlikely.
The bird hadn’t been particularly white. Actually it seemed a little brown. Or maybe a mix of brown and white? I needed to get a better look. Struggling to locate the bird again, I fumbled with my zoom lens so it would be ready to capture the proof I’d need. Accomplishment of this goal surely depended on photographic evidence. Yet it seemed foolish to even call it a goal. As simple as it was improbable, my mission was to spot my first snowy owl.
Odds of success were far from favorable. Fewer than 100 snowy owls had been reported in all of Wisconsin so far this winter, and I had knowingly avoided the most obvious places to look. But I brought to this outing an unearned optimism. For the longest time, I’ve considered myself a better-than-average birder. Someone who knows that blue herons are great and great egrets are white. Someone who can (usually) tell the difference between a downy and a hairy woodpecker — it’s the size of their peckers! Someone who kayaks down rivers and shouts “kingfisher!” when one darts across my path, the poor bird squawking its annoyance at being disturbed.
But it takes a special kind of ornithological hubris, or delusion, to think someone could spend a mere hour shuffling around a patch of state parkland, chosen nearly at random, and succeed in witnessing one of the birding world’s most beloved and elusive species.
My underlying reason for choosing Tichigan was a good one. My son Henry had a basketball tournament in Waterford, and I figured I could sneak away between games for a short outdoor adventure. I knew nothing of the Waterford area. In my quick online search, Tichigan Wildlife Area seemed the most promising option, a marshy 1,500 acres of state land in the far northwest corner of Racine County. The origins of the name are unclear, but like Michigan, Tichigan and the nearby lake of the same name may be derived from the Ojibwe for “along the great lake.”
Then I found a Wisconsin birding website with a page about Tichigan, and it listed the area’s “signature species” as waterfowl, American woodcock and sandhill crane. Under “rare species”: snowy owl.
“They’re gorgeous to look at,” Ryan Brady, the state Department of Natural Resources’ bird expert, told me when I contacted him about the snowy owl. “It’s a cool-looking bird.” He said he started tracking their numbers in the state more than a decade ago in response to an increase in public inquiries.
Photo courtesy of Ryan Brady
The Cornell University Lab of Ornithology describes the snowy, or Bubo scandiacus, as “one of the few birds that can get even non-birders to come out for a look.” And for obvious reasons! There’s the the white or mostly white plumage, the sharp yellow eyes, a wingspan as wide as five feet, the birds’ great heft — largest owl in North America, by weight. Some of us humans also may appreciate their rodent extermination skills or the cameos in the Harry Potter series. And their stoic, solitary personality feels like a window to the mysterious and unforgiving ecology of the Arctic.
I also recalled a friend of mine, Bob — much better than me at both birding and photography — telling the memorable story of seeing his first snowy owl. They aren’t endangered, though experts estimate a worldwide breeding population of fewer than 30,000. Only a tiny fraction of those travel to Wisconsin each winter.
“They’re rare enough that you feel fortunate that you saw one,” said Brady, a DNR conservation biologist. “You’re certainly not going to take it for granted.”
That was enough for me! Goal established, outing planned.
During an afternoon break in Henry’s basketball tournament, I drove about 10 miles to the Fox River boat launch on the north side of Tichigan. Ice fishermen passed by, dragging their gear in sleds. In the distance, snowmobiles occasionally disturbed the silence zipping up and down the river. I walked along the edge of the ice, enjoying the cold glow of a beautiful winter day.
Two snowmobile tracks led through a field of brown cattail husks. I followed, spotting some canine footprints, possibly coyote? No human footprints were nearby. And what creature left that poop on the trail? I’m no scat expert either. Couldn’t say for sure.
That’s when I spotted the might-just-be-an-owl flying overhead. I scrambled from the frozen river up a slight rise. A dirt path curved left toward a utility shed. I turned right instead to whack through the woods, on the hunt for my as-yet-unkown prey.
My binoculars were giving me trouble as I tried manipulating the dial into focus. I needed to to get a good enough look at it for a positive identification. From what I could tell so far, it just as easily could have been a hawk. Or even an oversized crow. Why was I so stumped?!
An adventure that ends in failure can still be adventurous, I thought. A dubious truism. It offered only dim consolation. The rest of my hike followed a similar pattern. No waterfowl, no woodcock, no sandhill crane. Other than the few fellow humans roaming around, the place seemed nearly deserted.
Total number of wild animals positively identified, zero.
Number of owls, also zero.
I drove back to the basketball tournament disheartened. Despite my sudden interest in the snowy owl, the snowy owl had no interest in me.
Hunting for birds and trying to get it right
There may be no right or wrong way to go about birdwatching. But there certainly are opinions.
I follow an online group of fellow bird nerds, and someone from Minnesota recently posted a photo seeking help identifying what looked like a snowy owl. Many of the responses focused on the bird, but the post also generated an impassioned side debate about whether to reveal where the photo was taken.
“Snowy Owl!! Do not disclose location!! Wonderful,” was one of the more concise pleas for secrecy.
Another commenter argued there was “good reason” to keep quiet about this bird. “Once a snowy is spotted and the location broadcast, flocks of photographers show up to pursue, which has sometimes led to the death of the owl.”
That may be true, though a lot of owl sightings already are reported publicly and easily tracked through the website eBird. Brady links to eBird on the DNR page he created about snowy owls in Wisconsin. I agree that we should treat snowy owls, and all birds, with respect and keep a healthy distance, but absolute secrecy isn’t possible and may not be necessary for this species, at least not yet.
Which is to say, the snowy owl is no ivory-billed woodpecker. Both breeds are sometimes considered “holy grail birds.” Searching for a snowy owl is entirely different. Its big advantage is it isn’t extinct.
Even the most believable ivory-billed woodpecker sightings over the past century have generated substantial skepticism, often because the more common pileated woodpecker looks so similar. The writer and respected bird nerd Tim Gallagher saw this as an irresistible challenge. “I think I’ve always been the kind of person who gets caught up in obsessive quests,” Gallagher says to open his 2005 book “The Grail Bird.” His quest was much more obsessive than mine, and also successful. In the book, he says found the ivory-billed woodpecker in the swamps of Arkansas. If true, Gallagher’s sighting may have been one of the last of its kind. In 2021, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced it no longer considered the ivory-billed woodpecker an endangered species. Sadly, that’s because “lost species” now seems the more accurate label.
The ivory-bill’s reported extinction is still actively debated, and it makes for a good read. But how much does it matter whether the number of woodpeckers remaining is two, one or zero? Its natural habitat is mostly gone because of logging. For the species to bounce back would take a miracle. The average birder has a greater chance of winning the lottery than conclusively identifying a “trust me this wasn’t a pileated” ivory-billed woodpecker.
That said, I found plenty to ponder in Gallagher’s quest. He spoke to a woman who claimed to have spotted an ivory-bill decades ago. At the time, she decided not to share her discovery with other humans. They wouldn’t have believed her anyway, and it would have been worse if they did.
“If you make the sighting known, you doom the bird,” she told Gallagher. “So far, we’ve shown as a species that we’re incapable of doing the right thing.”
With rare birds as with so much else.
If Gallagher and the other ivory-bill hunters represent one kind of birdwatching — obsessively seeking an unlikely, if not impossible, species — they aren’t the norm. I suspect most people go about birding the way I always have. You step outdoors, look for birds and try to identify any you see. You might keep a list of positive identifications. Or you might just keep those birds in your thoughts. Success, if that is the right word, increases with the number of birds seen and identified. Rare or common, all species can be appreciated.
Seeking a snowy owl treads a kind of middle ground between obsession and serendipity. At a certain time of year in Wisconsin, seeing one is a constant possibility, though you should prepare yourself for disappointment.
It’s a grail bird, but Brady also considers snowy owls a “nemesis bird,” meaning a bird that taunts you with its persistent elusiveness. “You can’t quite catch up to it,” he said, until you do — and then it’s no longer your nemesis.
Snowy owls usually start showing up in Wisconsin in early November and stay until March. Brady stops counting them around the middle of January, because by then, any snowy owl interested in wintering here has already made the flight. The annual numbers vary widely. Last winter, only about two dozen snowy owls visited Wisconsin, a state with 6 million humans. During big snowy owl migrations, a phenomenon known as an irruption, we can get more than 200.
Many don’t migrate, choosing instead to stay north and hunt on the edges of the Arctic ice, Brady said, provided they can find enough waterfowl to munch on. They thrive in wide-open spaces like the tundra. Snowy owls that fly south pass over the boreal forests of Canada and stop in places like Wisconsin that have good treeless hunting grounds. Open fields and wetlands are popular stops, as well as the shores and marinas of the Great Lakes.
This winter isn’t quite an irruption, but the 93 credible reports that Brady has logged are a sharp uptick over the low number of sightings in recent years. I asked Brady if he has thoughts on the debate over publicizing their locations. He said he falls in the middle.
“There are cases where it would have been better if nobody really knew about the owl,” he said, such as if the bird is too distracted by humans to hunt its prey or if it gets spooked and then hit by a car. But he doesn’t agree with total secrecy.
As a conservation biologist, “a lot of what I do revolves around citizen science,” Brady said. People generally are respectful of the birds, and public enthusiasm helps encourage conservation. “I think it’s really important to get people excited about birds and owls. Someone who went and saw a snowy owl is probably going to have a good memory of that, probably is going to have a stronger connection with that species, with nature in general, and they’re going to care more about it. They’re going to want to protect it.”
Photo courtesy of Ryan Brady.
Snowy owl firsts, and even rarer sightings
Does Brady remember seeing his first snowy owl? I should have anticipated his response. Of course he does.
He grew up in Philadelphia, where the snowy owl was a “mythical creature” to a city kid who could never hope to see one. Then he left home to attend college in Ashland, Wisconsin, on the shores of Lake Superior.
“I can remember walking into town at night one evening, and there was kind of a peak on a restaurant building. And even in the darkness, the city lights lit up this white snowy owl sitting on the top,” he said. It was an exhilarating sight, even though the owl “didn’t do anything particularly special.”
He has seen hundreds of snowy owls since, but that first one “was kind of the gateway” to becoming an avid, experienced birdwatcher.
A few days after my owl-less outing at the Tichigan Wilderness Area, I met with my friend Bob and asked him about his first snowy. He preferred that I not specify where it was, other than an area in northeastern Wisconsin where snowy owls are more common. He said he arrived at his birdwatching destination and got out his camera, thinking he would stroll around, take some time, look about and maybe see a snowy eventually. Then he passed a guy in a pickup truck, who shouted at him, “Hey! Lookin’ for the owl?!”
The man gestured in the bird’s direction, and from there, it wasn’t hard for Bob to find what he was looking for. The bird was magnificent but the moment somewhat bittersweet.
“It was good and bad,” Bob said. “Good in that there was a bird there. Bad in that I kind of selfishly wanted the moment where I spotted it myself.”
So, pardon: a digression.
It seems proper to note here yet another kind of birdwatching success. It requires the purest form of serendipity, a whole lot of luck and the smarts to know when you’ve been lucky. Bob has been lucky enough and smart enough to experience this kind, too.
These kinds of stories sometimes make headlines in Wisconsin, when an exotic species takes a wrong turn in Albuquerque or Albania or Alberta and ends up in our state, sparking a frenzy among local birders. Back in summer 2023, for example, a roseate spoonbill, usually an inhabitant of the tropics, appeared in Green Bay. It was said to be the first Wisconsin sighting of such a bird in 178 years.
Bob’s brush with birding history came early one Saturday morning in May 2024. He had ventured shortly after dawn to Lion's Den Gorge Nature Preserve in Grafton, one of his go-to destinations for birdwatching and messing about with the camera. On such outings, his top three top priorities are (in this order) to get outdoors, to practice his camera skills and to find birds or other wildlife that would make interesting subjects for photos.
What he found that morning was more than interesting. It was the rarest of birds, a varied bunting, typically found in Mexico. This was the first member of its species ever recorded in Wisconsin. Other birdwatchers also logged sightings of the varied bunting that day, and it generated quite a bit of buzz in birding circles. Still, Bob likely holds the distinction of seeing it first.
Bob went out that day with no expectation of finding this particular bird. “Zero percent,” he said, but its significance wasn’t lost on him. “There are people who have forgotten more about birding that I’ll ever know, but I know enough that I knew that was something unusual.”
And how unlike the search for owls! They are special in their own way, Bob said. “They’re different than other birds, because they’re usually nocturnal. You usually don’t see them. They’re specifically designed by Mother Nature not to be seen.”
However you go about birdwatching, there’s always an element of surprise, whether you’re looking for a snowy owl, something even more exotic or nothing in particular. You may see an unusual bird. Often you don’t. Chances are good that at least something will catch your eye.
“That’s kind of what’s enjoyable about it for me,” Bob said. “When you go out, you kind of have this idea of ‘What am I going to see?’ And you don’t know.”
For a little birdwatching luck, always be looking
Even Paul Bannick doesn’t know, and I can’t imagine anyone more committed to finding snowy owls than Paul Bannick.
Bannick’s 2020 book “Snowy Owl: A Visual Natural History” has good info about the species and a lot of superb photos of owls in action. By his own accounting, he has spent tens of thousands of hours on snowy owls’ trail, much of that time in the Arctic waiting patiently on the tundra for them to pass in front of his lens.
“I photographed at tundra nests over three seasons, often staying in a blind for days at a time with little, if any, sleep, enveloped in dense clouds of mosquitoes and hoping not to be visited by a polar bear,” he writes. “I successfully watched courtship during two seasons yet failed to even find owls on several other trips.”
That’s dedication to the bird, for sure, and also an impossible standard of vigilance for an amateur birder like myself to match! I love looking at the snowy owls in Bannick’s photos. But if even he strikes out while pulling successive Arctic all-nighters, how could I ever hope to get lucky during a quick stop at a marshy field in Racine County?
Tim Gallagher is probably impressed by Paul Bannick’s level of obsession. I’m just intimidated.
But also not entirely deterred. Maybe the roll of the dice is the point. Sometimes you’re cooped up for days in a bird blind and go home owl-less. Other times, a loud guy in a pickup truck points you right to where you need to be. I doubt it matters as much as just getting out there in nature and looking around.
Bob said as much to me, when I asked if he thought I was foolish to go searching for a snowy owl with so little understanding of the bird and so little insight into where it might be found. He was polite but also realistic. Just going outdoors is no guarantee you’ll find an owl — or anything you’re searching for.
“Not to say you can’t,” he clarified. “The better thing to do is kind of always be looking.”
Looking where? Everywhere. And Tichigan Wildlife Area is now part of my everywhere. Let’s give it a second thought.
Surrounded by farms, most of Tichigan’s acres are marshes and fields, bordered by a river. Brady had emphasized that open areas are prime snowy owl hunting grounds. Proximity to wetlands is a plus. Maybe Tichigan had potential after all. My bigger mistake may have been timing. Snowls are diurnal — they are more visible during the day, unlike other owl species — but that doesn’t mean they do much during daylight hours, Brady said.
“Your better bet is to head out kind of at dawn or dusk, what we call the crepuscular periods,” he said. That’s when snowy owls are more likely to be out hunting or foraging.
Two weeks after my first visit to Tichigan, I woke before dawn, took care of some rudimentary preparations (mostly involving coffee) and drove the 40 minutes from my home to the wilderness area. This time, I parked on the west side, in a gravel lot off Marsh Road. The sky, though cloudy, was just beginning to show first light. Sunrise was a half hour off. And I was alone. Or so I thought.
No, this is not where I reveal that all my efforts paid off. There will be no snowy owls to give this outing a happy ending. I am, after all, a member of a species incapable of doing the right thing.
But nature, in its abundance, can be surprisingly forgiving, even when we are undeserving of its grace. Within the first five minutes after stepping out of my car, a raccoon scurried out of a thin grove of trees and crossed my path, crunching on some flattened cattail straw. He seemed to pause and look at me but then went about his raccoon business.
What sounded like a mess of Canada geese was making a racket on the river in the distance. Another flock of birds caught my attention overhead, perhaps ducks. After following the path cut through the frozen marsh for about a half mile, I reached solid ground and a patch of larger vegetation. Suddenly the small trees and sky seemed to erupt with birds, none of which I felt confident identifying in the low light of dawn. My steps at one point provoked the snorting of some deer hiding to the side of the trail. Later, in the open marsh, two well-antlered bucks stopped and stared in my direction, perhaps distracted by the clicking of my camera.
Further along, I made it to the boat launch that had been my first outing’s point of origin. No other humans stirred at this hour, but there were plenty of sparrows and sparrow-size birds. My camera and binoculars were no match as they flitted around the shrubs. After sharing their presence for a bit, I turned to retrace my steps back to my car.
Driving back to the main highway, I stopped one more time, at a separate parkland entrance on Tichigan’s northeast end. A cardinal darted past my window, and I got out to follow it along a row of trees next to an empty field. I know cardinals, and could identify the female and male bouncing from branch to branch maybe 15 feet away, the most ordinary of backyard birds. I gave them all of my attention for a few minutes.
Nearby, my ear caught a woodpecker hacking at a tree. Not an ivory-billed woodpecker, certainly. A downy woodpecker, probably, but I couldn’t locate it by sight to confirm my suspicion. By sight, it was as elusive as the extinct bird.
There’s always next time, I figured, as I walked back to the car. In my head, I was already making plans to come back.