A snowy owl in Central Park drew flocks of people (and crows) on Wednesday. Maryté Mercado
If you tend bird-nerdy, you will want to read this. To state the obvious (if you visit here regularly), we live for this kind of news:
Snowy Owl Is Spotted in Central Park, for First Time in 130 Years
The hordes came running and the snow-white raptor became the latest celebrity bird of Manhattan.
In the winter of 1890, a snowy owl was spotted in New York City’s Central Park, part of what a contemporary account called an “unusual abundance” along the East Coast of the large, strikingly beautiful predators that make their home in the Arctic tundra.
“Unusual” is right. A snowy owl, according to birding records, did not show its fluffy self in Central Park for another 130 years.
Then came Wednesday morning.
A birder who runs the Twitter account Manhattan Bird Alert read about an owl sighting on a tracking site and sounded the alarm.
“A SNOWY OWL, a mega-rarity for Central Park,” he wrote, “is now in the middle of the North Meadow ball fields.” The cluster of baseball and softball diamonds might have reminded the owl of its native hunting grounds or the sandy beaches of Queens and Long Island where owls often stop by in the winter.
The hordes came running, cameras and spotting scopes in hand, and the snow-white raptor with the thick black bars that mark a young female was the latest instant-celebrity bird of Manhattan — a sequel to both Rocky the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree owl from last year and the superstar Mandarin duck that ruled the park and the world’s social-media feeds in 2018…
Read the whole story here.
