Snowy owls nest on the tundra in the far north of the world, which is open, treeless land. Snowy owls are nomadic: they wander to wherever prey is plentiful rather than returning to one home. Tracking showed snowy owls to be among the great nomads of birds, ranging thousands of miles across the Arctic. It also showed that a snowy owl breeding in central Canada one year may be in Greenland the next. One tracked snowy owl moved 881 miles (1,418 km) across an area of 1,784 square miles (4,621 sq. km).

In winter, many snowy owls travel south to Canada and the northern United States, where they live in open places such as prairies, farmland, beaches and airports. Some winters, many more snowy owls than usual move south out of the Arctic, and the snowy owls that travel farthest south tend to be the young ones. Some snowy owls spend weeks or months in winter on the frozen Great Lakes. Winter snowy owl numbers in the south probably relate to how much prey there is in the north, and scientists say snowy owl migration is not fully understood.

A snowy owl's favorite food is the lemming, a small mouselike animal, and a snowy owl may eat about 1,600 lemmings in a year. Each owl must catch the equivalent of 7 to 12 mice a day to meet its food needs. On Bylot Island in the Canadian Arctic, collared and brown lemmings make up about 96% of a breeding snowy owl's diet. To raise young across most of their range, snowy owls need high numbers of lemmings, small rodents weighing 60 to 90 grams, and lemmings fuel the owls' reproduction.

Snowy owls often hunt in the daytime, and in a study of snowy owl hunting, owls used two main methods: perch and scan, and hover and scan. A snowy owl often hunts by sitting still on a high spot and watching for food, and it flies low and sweeps down to grab prey with one foot. The snowy owl has excellent eyesight and hearing, its hearing is sharp enough to find animals hiding under snow, and its acute hearing helps it detect prey in dim light, when vision is limited.

Snowy owls nest on the ground, and they start laying eggs from mid-May to early June, depending on weather and food. On Bylot Island, females lay 3 to 11 eggs, 7 on average per nest. The nest is built and kept up by the female alone, and the eggs take about 32 to 33 days to hatch. Young snowy owls first fly well, or fledge, at about 50 to 60 days old. As of November 2026, the longest-lived wild snowy owl on record was a female at least 23 years and 10 months old.

Words to know

• nomads: wanderers
• tundra: treeless land
• prey: food animals
• fledge: first fly well