Visitors flock to Missoula to see snowy owls

POLSON, Mont. — The last time Polson adventurer Marty Zajanc saw a snowy owl, he spent 10 years hiking more than 3,000 miles across Alaska and into the Arctic Circle to do it.

Last week, he drove a few blocks across town and found several.

"I think I recognized a couple of them," Zajanc says. "I could swear two of them winked at me."

Of course, finding snowy owls wasn't the purpose of his walk across Alaska. He did that to test the limits of his endurance.

But when Zajanc headed up to a little neighborhood above Skyline Drive here armed with still and video cameras, snowy owls were the only reason for the jaunt.

They're the reason hundreds of people have flocked here since the owls unceremoniously appeared last month.

"It's so funny — it's all I've been doing for three weeks now," Denver Holt, director of the Owl Research Institute near Charlo said recently. "Every day I've got newspapers, TV stations and magazines large and small calling. I was on the phone with the New York Times yesterday. I've heard of people coming from Colorado, Utah, even Texas to see them. This morning four people from Livingston knocked on my door wanting to know where to find them."

When the Five Valleys Audubon Society in Missoula put out word it was sponsoring a trip this weekend for anyone interested in seeing the snowy owls, coordinator Rebecca Sills says she tried to cut off attendance at 70 people, then gave up and added a second trip after the list passed 100 names.

Victor Emanual Nature Tours of Austin, Texas, has quickly put together two tours to Montana for its clients who want to see snowy owls. They're scheduled for late January and early February.

Holt, whose work with snowy owls was the subject of the December 2002 National Geographic cover story, has been asked to lead them all.

"It's exciting and exhilarating," says Sills, a TogetherGreen fellow with the Audubon Society.

For Holt, who has traveled to the Arctic Circle to study snowy owls, part of the excitement that comes with the birds' wintertime appearance in the Mission Valley is that it's not just dedicated birders who want to see them.

People who might not give a marvellous spatuletail a second glance, much less know how rare it is to see one, get a kick out of observing snowy owls, and it's not hard to see why.