The world looks different from the vantage point of silence. I am the ghost of the tundra, a sentinel draped in white armor, watching as the sun barely dips below the horizon on a June evening in the high Arctic. Thoreau said that “we need the tonic of wildness,” but up here, wildness isn’t a tonic—it’s the whole pharmacy.
I am what your field guides call a Snowy Owl, Bubo scandiacus, though names are human inventions and mean little to me. What matters is that I’m perfectly engineered for this place where winter never truly leaves. My pure white feathers—tinged with black bars in youth and on females—aren’t just for show. They’re the cloak of a master hunter who waits in plain sight, invisible against the snow.
Unlike my woodland cousins, I hunt by day. There’s something liberating about being nocturnal in a land where the sun forgets to set for months at a time. In summer, the Arctic becomes one endless hunting session, broken only by brief moments of rest. The philosopher Epictetus spoke about accepting what’s beyond our control. Up here, that includes the strange dance of daylight and darkness that dictates our rhythms.
My diet consists primarily of lemmings—those small, furry creatures that scurry beneath the snow. I can devour three to five of them daily, sometimes 1,600 in a single year. I’ve developed a technique: perch, wait, listen. My facial disc collects sounds like a satellite dish, funneling whispers of movement beneath the snow directly to my ears. When I strike, it’s with the surety of necessity, not cruelty. Death here is neither romantic nor tragic—it’s just the currency of survival.
When food grows scarce, I do what most consider impossible: I travel south. Not by force of instinct like some, but by choice. These irruptions carry me down to your human-populated realms, where I become a celebrity perched on roadside fences or airport runways. Birdwatchers drive hundreds of miles to glimpse what you call my “regal bearing.” But I’m not here for admiration. I’m here for mice, voles, anything that moves.
My courtship begins in April, with the male—that would be me—performing aerial displays and delivering lemmings to prove my worth. “Love,” wrote Kahlil Gibran, “gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.” But in the Arctic, love also means bringing home dinner. We build our nest on the bare ground, a simple scrape where she’ll lay 3-11 eggs. The number depends on lemming populations—nature’s way of balancing the cosmic ledger.
The eggs hatch sequentially, which means the oldest chick might be feeding while the youngest still pecks at its shell. It’s a brutal efficiency that ensures at least some offspring survive when times are hard. We feed them lemmings, of course, and occasionally Arctic hares, ptarmigan, even small geese. The chicks fledge at about 50 days but stay dependent on us for months. Parenthood, it seems, is universally demanding across species.
My wingspan stretches nearly five feet across, making me one of the largest owls in North America. My feathers are so thick they cover even my talons, a feature that seems extravagant until you spend a winter here. Rachel Carson wrote that “those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” She was right, but she never mentioned how beauty can sometimes be found in simple adaptation.
We Snowy Owls face an uncertain future. Climate change alters the Arctic faster than most places, and our prey cycles grow less predictable. Some years, I find myself ranging further south than ever before, seeking sustenance in landscapes increasingly fragmented by human development. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists us as Vulnerable, though that’s just another human label for a complex reality.
The silence of the tundra is different from the silence of death. It’s alive with potential, pregnant with the whispers of wind through ice crystals, the distant crack of glaciers calving, the soft rustle of feathers as I adjust my position. I’m not just watching this world—I’m participating in its ancient dialogue.
As the Arctic summer wanes and the light begins to shift, I prepare for another cycle. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” The same is true of the Arctic. Each season changes me, changes this landscape. We are both constant and ever-shifting, like the dance of aurora across the winter sky.
Tomorrow, I’ll hunt again. I’ll glide on silent wings across snow that seems to stretch forever, my shadow merging with the endless white. And if someone glimpses me from afar, perhaps they’ll understand that I’m not just a bird, but a living testament to the wild places that still exist—places where time moves differently, where survival is an art form, and where silence speaks volumes to those who know how to listen.