Snowy Owl print

White on white, almost. The Snowy Owl settles on sea-worn driftwood, golden eyes open and level, the pale ivory plumage picking up the grey and cream tones of the weathered wood beneath. There is almost no boundary between bird and perch. The plate renders that stillness exactly: a hushed Audubon-style palette of ivory, bone and soft grey, with those round amber eyes as the only point of heat.

Bubo scandiacus is the heaviest owl in North America. A female can weigh up to 2,000 grams, roughly twice the weight of a Great Horned Owl, with a wingspan reaching 164 centimetres. She nests directly on open Arctic tundra - no tree, no cavity, just a scraped hollow in frozen ground. Clutch size scales almost directly with prey abundance: in a lean year the pair may not breed at all; in a good lemming year the clutch can run to eleven eggs. A Snowy Owl can consume more than 1,600 lemmings in a single year.

Unlike most owls, the Snowy hunts in full daylight - a necessity in an Arctic summer that never gets dark. In certain winters, large cohorts of young birds appear far south of their normal range: on airport runways, beach dunes, coastal marshes. In the winter of 2013, the popular explanation was starvation. It turned out to be wrong. Most were young birds from a banner breeding year, overflowed by abundance.

The IUCN lists the species as Vulnerable. The oldest known Snowy Owl on record was at least 23 years and 10 months old.

In the tradition of Audubon, a bird of snow and Arctic silence, drawn for the wall.

Full field guide: /species/snowy-owl/