Snowy owl struck and killed in McHenry County after drawing crowds of photographers

Scott Weidensaul says he was not surprised to hear that the snowy owl that attracted photographers and birdwatchers as it hung out this month in fields in the McHenry area died after being hit by a car.

Snowy owls are “gorgeous, big, charismatic, sexy birds” that people want to see up close, said Weidensaul, a researcher of the arctic raptor with Project Snowstorm, a New England-based nonprofit that studies snowy owl migration.

Photographers, bird watchers and the curious “want to get close to them, but it gets to be too much for these birds,” Weidensaul said.

Ashley O’Herron, public information officer for the McHenry Police Department, confirmed that the owl was struck by a vehicle and killed sometime Monday night or Tuesday morning.

A passerby saw the white owl on the side of Bull Valley Road, near Crystal Lake Road, and called police sometime before 5 a.m. Tuesday.

“It was a hit and run,” O’Herron said of the bird’s death.

She said the person whose vehicle collided with the bird may not have been aware of the strike.

The juvenile male owl, who likely hatched last summer, was the first confirmed sighting of a snowy owl here in several years, according to Jeff Aufmann, vice president of the McHenry County Audubon Society.

The Illinois Department of Natural Resources was informed of the bird’s death, and it was taken to an area veterinarian’s office, O’Herron said.

The IDNR has since taken the bird’s remains for study, said Sara Denham, wildlife resource center manager for the McHenry County Conservation District.

Weidensaul said on Tuesday that Project Snowstorm would like to examine the bird or work with a local agency to get testing results.

“We hate to see these birds die, but we want to get as much scientific data from the death as possible,” Weidensaul said.

Denham said the attention the bird received before it died “is not the best for the bird’s survivability."

Weidensaul is a natural history writer and bird migration researcher who co-founded Project Snowstorm 11 years ago.

He identified the McHenry snowy owl as a young male based on photos sent to him last week. It’s not unusual for the birds, which breed on arctic tundra and sub-tundra, to come south in the winter before returning to their native lands to mate.

“Some wander constantly ... others plunk themselves down and never move from a quarter-mile area all winter,” he said.

Something Weidensaul and his organization want to check for is the potential of finding rodenticide in the bird. The owls' favorite meals are mid-sized birds and small mammals, which can include mice. If a mouse has eaten from an outdoor bait trap, that poison can be passed on to the bird, Weidensaul said.

When researchers first began a decade ago testing owls that had died, only limited amounts of rodent poison were found and not in lethal levels, Weidensaul said. Last year, half of the owls tested had lethal levels.

As much as poison can hurt a raptor, the attention the birds get can be a killer, he said.

People “want to get close to them, and it gets to be too much for these birds,” Weidensaul said. Snowy owls sleep on the ground during the day – often when people go looking for them.

“They are harassed all day long, getting just a little closer for a better photo or look, and they end up flushing them again and again,” he said.

Nor does the bird know what trees, humans or cars are, Aufmann said.

“He was just young. He just hatched last summer, and he was inexperienced,” Aufmann said.

Aufmann estimates that thousands of photos were taken of the owl after it showed up. Many of the photos were shared on social media.