The piercing yellow eyes and deadly hunting skills of the snowy owl awe bird-lovers in the U.S. Midwest every winter.
Now, thanks to what has been heralded as the most comprehensive summary of migration patterns ever assembled, those birders can see where those raptors migrated from: the Seal River watershed in northern Manitoba.
“We didn’t know that,” said Jeff Wells of the National Audubon Society, which activated its online Bird Migration Explorer on Thursday.
“We didn’t know that the owls that go to the Midwest are filtering through the Seal River.”
The Explorer, which combines millions of observations on hundreds of bird species, is full of such connections linking countries and continents—and amazing discoveries….