10/03/2026
On Thanksgiving Day 2011, a snowy owl was flying around the runways at Honolulu International Airport. It was the first snowy owl ever recorded in Hawaii. Nobody knows how it crossed 2,500 miles of open Pacific to get there.
The state of Hawaii contracts runway bird control at Honolulu Airport to the USDA's Wildlife Services Division. Officers drive the runways all day, chasing birds that could be sucked into jet engines.
On the morning of November 24, an officer spotted a white bird with black-barred wings sitting on the tarmac. He called his supervisor to confirm what it was. It was confirmed as a snowy owl.
The officer spent roughly two hours trying to move it. He fired five flares, which function like firecrackers. The owl did not leave. He tried to catch it with net guns and could not get close enough. By about 10 a.m., one of the busiest periods on the runway, the owl was still there. To mitigate risk he had to shoot it.
Dan Meisenzahl, a state transportation spokesman, defended the officer to Civil Beat. He said it was done with a heavy heart and after exhausting all options. He called the USDA wildlife officers the unsung heroes of airport operations and said they were still upset about it a month later. They were distraught over the whole situation, he said.
The reason a snowy owl was in Hawaii at all is the reason thousands of them were turning up across the lower 48 that winter. The 2011-12 irruption was the largest southward movement of snowy owls in decades, and the cause was the opposite of what most people assume.
Snowy owls irrupt south after a good lemming year. A summer of abundant lemmings in the Arctic produces large clutches and high chick survival. By fall, there are more young owls than the Arctic can feed through the winter. The surplus birds disperse south, sometimes thousands of miles beyond their normal range. That winter, snowy owls turned up in Idaho, Missouri, Oklahoma, Bermuda, and Hawaii. One Idaho birder reported four around Nampa. Thousands of people drove to Smithville Lake in Missouri to see five.
The Honolulu bird was a juvenile male. A young owl dispersing for the first time, flying south from the Arctic in a year when every instinct said keep going, apparently kept going past the coast and across 2,500 miles of ocean. Whether it island-hopped, hitched a ride on a ship, or flew the entire distance on its own is unknown and will remain unknown. The bird is now specimen BPBM 185577 in the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.
Image is for illustration purposes only
Source: Civil Beat / New York Times / Dan Meisenzahl, Hawaii DOT / Denver Holt, Owl Research Institute / Bishop Museum, Honolulu / HBS Rare Bird Photograph File.
