Each snowy owl must catch the equivalent of 7 to 12 mice a day to meet its food needs. A snowy owl's favorite food is the lemming, a small mouselike animal. A snowy owl may eat about 1,600 lemmings in a year.

To raise young across most of their range, snowy owls need high numbers of lemmings, small rodents weighing 60 to 90 grams. Lemmings fuel the owls' reproduction. Snowy owls nest on the tundra mainly in years when lemmings are plentiful.

A snowy owl has excellent eyesight and hearing. Its hearing is sharp enough to find animals hiding under snow. A snowy owl's acute hearing also helps it detect prey in dim light, when vision is limited.

Snowy owls hunt at any time of day, except in severe weather. A snowy owl often hunts by sitting still on a high spot and watching for food.

Snowy owls are nomadic: they wander to wherever prey is plentiful rather than returning to one home. Scientists say snowy owl migration is not fully understood.

Some winters, many more snowy owls than usual move south out of the Arctic. These big moves happen every few years. Snowy owls that go south usually begin the trip in November, and most are gone from their winter range by April.

The snowy owls that travel farthest south tend to be the young ones. Some spend weeks or months in winter on the frozen Great Lakes.

As of November 2026, the IUCN Red List, a global list of threatened species, lists the snowy owl as Vulnerable. Vulnerable is a category on that list.

South of the tundra, the winter habitat of snowy owls is open, flat land that resembles tundra. In winter, they live in open places such as prairies, farmland, beaches and airports.

Words to know

• tundra: treeless land
• nomadic: always wandering
• acute: very sharp
• habitat: living place