The steady flow of Snowy Owl reports from South Dakota birders – 20 owls in a day, 17 owls in a day, three owls in one mile – they got the best of me earlier this week. It was a 929-mile round trip. Too much driving, I know, but I only do the long birding road trip about once a year.

My destination was the flat cropland and pieces of prairie that surround the Lake Andes National Wildlife Refuge 90 minutes west of Sioux Falls. I had visited by email with a birder who lives next door to the refuge, a man who needed all his toes and fingers to count owl sightings on a daily basis.

I was on the scene at 11 a.m. I drove the designated roads for four hours. I saw one Snowy Owl. At a point I stopped the car to consult the email stored on my laptop computer. Was I in the right state?

Right refuge? Right roads? Yes. I called my email contact. He and his wife had been out that very morning. "We saw about 20 owls," he told me.

I'm looking for large white birds in a brown landscape. How hard can that be? I drove the routes one more time before sundown. I found one more owl.

The Lake Andes Christmas Bird Count was the next morning. I joined the counters briefly to watch someone lean over a map and run his finger across the best places to find owls. In the next four hours I did find five Snowy Owls. My two-day total was seven, one more than my lifetime total prior to this trip. I had no reason to complain. But I grumbled anyway. One birder had posted on his photo web site head-and-shoulder shots of 17 different Snowies. That means he was able to stop his car very close to the birds, most likely owls on roadside fence posts. All of my owls flushed before I could get closer than, say, 80 feet. (But my photos then captured context, right?)

The single redeeming event that day was a brief conversation with one of the bird-count teams, four gentlemen who had seen many owls, four guys who knew the route. At that point, three hours into their search, they had seen one Snowy Owl. I had four!

I don't know where the owls were, or if they were. I don't know if time of day was a factor (I birded early, late, and middle). I don't know how many I just didn't see, but, come on, white birds on a brown background. I did learn to scan the ground carefully. Most bird species, with the exception of game birds, are found perching at eye level or above, or flying. Some of my Snowy Owls sat in fields of corn debris, in plowed fields, in grassy fields. My sample was small, goodness knows, but only three of them were perched high, if you can call the top of a fence post high.

One treat was to watch the flushed owls fly away. They didn't go up. They went down, drifting off those post tops to fly a foot or two above the ground. They reminded me of pelagic birds – shearwaters and petrels flying close to the water. The owls are strong flyers, beautiful gliders after two or three wing pumps.

I returned Wednesday night. From then until now (1:30 p.m. Friday) there has not been a single owl report from South Dakota. Looks like my timing was both poor (should have gone sooner) or fortunate (didn't go later). Here's a photo of one of the birds, taking the sun on a rock pile in the middle of a plowed field. A lovely bird, heavily barred with black, meaning it's a juvenile. All but one of the birds reported from the Lake Andes NWR refuge have been juveniles, as are most of those being seen in Minnesota. The photo was taken with a 400mm lens from about 100 feet. It has been cropped significantly.