Snowy Owl stares like I'm a cotton rat, white feathered head and face, penetrating bright yellow eyes, long black talons -- obviously up to the task -- partially obscured by white feathers. An email from Bruce Shackleford, an environmental consultant for the City of Fayetteville, details an owl near Asbury, Missouri, that a UPS driver has been seeing for five weeks! The location in Bruce's email is up on the old Ozark prairies near Asbury, Missouri, south of Prairie State Park and adjacent Wah-Sha-She Prairie State Wildlife Area. Looks like the real deal, so Sally Jo Gibson from Harrison, David Oakley from Springdale, and me (Fayetteville) are on the road. It's mostly the hilly and currently leafless Ozarks. At Bella Vista, 71 runs alongside golf courses and limestone overhangs and Tanyard Creek, where we see Great Blue Herons standing in nests in tall, white sycamores, whole scene dappled with sycamore balls. At Joplin, chicken house tin is crumbled around upper limbs of bare trees, testimony to the tornado of May 22, 2011, 160 lives lost. We swing around the city on the east, then north, now on highway 171, and pass a village of FEMA trailers for survivors of 7,000 destroyed homes. We have popped onto old prairies, now mostly converted to vast flats of winter wheat. Minutes ahead: Asbury, then Wah-Sha-She and hopefully the owl of Bruce's email. The Kansas line is two miles ahead. After rain and melted snow, it's green with emerging wheat, brown with fresh planting, mainly open country, very open, like the land of Snowy Owls. It's been three months give or take since owls became birder's discussion list headliners. For Arkansans, frustrating months of mainly white 5-gallon buckets and wind-blown Walmart bags imaginatively and longingly viewed on the backsides of big fields. Now there are Lapland Longspurs among Horned Larks and Savannah Sparrows in a plowed field. Northern Harriers are everywhere. As we turn off 171 onto Redbud Road, we spot the familiar 5-gallon bucket, but this one slowly turns toward us, with big yellow eyes. The owl seems to prefer a slightly elevated ground perch formed by big gravels, maybe like the windy, bouldery arctic barrens where they nest? We take our views from a portable blind -- Sally Jo's car. We are pretty close; the owl seems immune to rational fears of, say, Red-tailed Hawks persecuted by many generations of Arkansas boys. It mainly surveys the other parts of its 360 degree domain. In truth, we're not in Missouri, Arkansas, or even close to Kansas. Welcome to a big field on the continent of North America, within Snowy Owl range this winter. -- JOSEPH C. NEAL in Fayetteville, Arkansas "I loaf and invite my soul..." -- Walt Whitman
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Congratulations to Andrew S. of Arcata, CA, who was randomly chosen from the entries that correctly identified last month's Savannah Sparrow, at right. Good luck with this month's challenge, Poking Around, below. HINT: Over 10% of my global population can be found in the 
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