Snowy in the City: Owl sightings near busy highway in Toronto

Snowy Owl near Cloverdale Mall, January 2015 (Photo courtesy of Lynda & Jim Mackiewicz, Wild Birds Unlimited in Toronto)

Snowy Owl sightings around Toronto’s shoreline parks have been common the past two winters, but this week drivers could see them perched near busy highway intersections.

Kyle Holloway, an employee at a Wild Birds Unlimited in Toronto’s west end, said he spotted the large Snowy Owl Monday at the on-ramp of Highway 427 and Dundas Street West. He said he saw the bird in the same area on Tuesday and Wednesday, and a second Snowy on the ramp from the 401 to the 410 North.

Holloway is a graduate of the wildlife and fisheries program at Fleming College in Lindsay. He is an avid birder, noting that he took up the hobby eight or nine years ago.

“I was pretty excited,” he said, mentioning that spotting the owl was an “exhilarating experience.”

The owl was actively flying from light standards at Cloverdale Mall to nearby highway signs on Highway 427, Holloway recalled.

The most surprising thing to him: Shoppers and other birds in the area seemed oblivious to the large Snowy, which was actively hunting in a Metro parking lot.

Emily Rondel, the Toronto Project Coordinator of Bird Studies Canada, says it’s safe for Snowy Owls who fly into urban areas, if people are respectful.

She advises that humans not get too close to these large, beautiful birds.

“It can get pretty stressful for them when people approach,” Rondel added.

Snowy owls spend their summers nesting in the Arctic and are “ irruptive” in the south -- which means that some winters there’ll be a lot of sightings and some years there will be very few.

Rondel said that owls in this area are “kind of a boom or bust thing” -- meaning that you can’t really predict what influences them to fly south.

“It’s different because it’s one of those birds that doesn’t just live in Canada,” Rondel said, noting that some of the birds could be from as far north as Norway. “They certainly live and breed much further up north.”

Many factors influence an owl’s decision to fly south but one main decision is availability of prey.

There have been other sightings in the GTA: at Colonel Samuel Smith Park (south Etobicoke), Bronte Park (Oakville), and Whitby Harbour. Birders can track their sightings on a website called eBird, which is a map that allows users to pin exactly where a snowy owl is spotted.

As for Holloway, he’s telling people to take time to observe their surroundings. “If people look up occasionally, they can see something pretty cool."