Snow Owls

Until recently (two years after the second millennium was welcomed by humankind holding its breath) the snowy owl was thought to be the solo member of Nyctea scandiaca, a distinct genus that set them apart from all other owls. But when the millennium came, as the owls saw it, humans came newly equipped with smaller syringes and swabs, more wires that connected more machines, and yet the machines took up less space. The machines had ideas, and these ideas were what took up the space. Things could happen without collective human input, the owls noticed. Trees were coming down and no one knew who was deciding it, and the world over, these machines made humans less able to see further afield, and more desirous to be somewhere they couldn't even visualise. They had come and done tests and snowy owls were soon declared to be related, by genetic make-up, to the horned owls. Nyctae scandiaca was no longer special, suddenly a snowy owl was just another Bubo. The snowy owls mostly stay in their summer home, north of the point of latitude at 60 degrees north. Their nests are built in the northernmost reaches of the Arctic tundra- Alaska, Canada and parts of Eurasia. But renegade families have stayed south or else flown back down, as far as the American gulf states, Russia's deepest south, and then places not so far south but off the regular map for any snowy owl- remote regions among the outer hebrides where the British Isles lie. All the snowy owls moving in arctic circles caught wind of what happened to one of their kind who, flying in isolation, landed tragically in the tangles of a big ship with Ulunda written on its vast flanks, spitting steam. The owl had made it to Nova Scotia but couldn't come back to tell the tale (though none of the owls claimed to be missing a mate or family member, so none were sure who this lost owl would escape back home to). The lost owl was captured and later stuffed, filled up with human chemicals so it would linger on the brink of decomposition, and remains trapped in a suspended state of living death behind a sheet of glass in a place where humans can come just to stare through the pane. (This story is told in such a tone to warn young snowy owls from going rogue during migration periods or even migrating when no other owls were migrating). Ten and one years after the second millennium, or maybe ten and two years after (some of the stretch in between) there was a migration of snowy owls that winter, which went down in history. It was a mass migration, and thousands disappeared. They made new homes for themselves in an array of new places scattered across the American States. This was a shock to many, but it seemed to have started a new feeling, a new zeitgeist for spontaneous exploration in the place of regimented migration. There didn't have to be a reason anymore, and they didn't have to share the same destination goal. A year and another winter on, another even larger mass migration happened. Some snowy owls even got to Florida. There are theories among the snowy owls that this new attitude grew as a result of being stripped of their individual identity and broken out of their insular circle, made to be seen and evaluated not as snowy but as horned. And even if they were still being valued by humans for being snowy, they were written in human law books in the same category, with the same value, as the horned owls. Some snowy owls believe that the destruction of their special grouping, with all its specialness, led to the destruction of their long-standing grouping behaviours. Rituals no longer adhered to. Standard routes no longer taken. Snowy owls moving south, away from arctic places, finding new uncharted grounds to make their nests. Dreams about places such as Florida became more commonplace for the snowy owl. The new millennium had meant the start of upheavals, turnarounds, rapid changes, exceptions rather than rules, and the accelerating rate of change. It was a crescendo, an exponential curve. More changes, more quickly, and no time to try and prepare, no space in the mind to conceive of how to prepare for new circumstances yet to be thought of, but surely soon to become realised.