Getting a good, ethical, photograph of a snowy owl without endangering or harassing the bird is a matter of patience and respect for the subject. (©Melissa Groo)
Every year, it seems that birders and photographers – whether intentionally or not – put more and more pressure on snowy owls in winter. So we we’re grateful that Melissa Groo, one of the most respected conservation photographers in the world and a longtime supporter of Project SNOWstorm, offered to share her thoughts on how to photograph these majestic birds ethically and safely. (There is more information about snowy owl observation etiquette here, including a downloadable infographic that Project SNOWstorm produced on the subject that is available for free distribution and posting.)
Here’s Melissa.
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Globally, snowy owls are in trouble. A 2024 study partially underwritten by Project SNOWstorm, in cooperation with the other members of the International Snowy Owl Working Group, found that the global population is fewer than 30,000 breeding age adults, and has declined by more than 30 percent over the past three owl generations, about 25 years. In May 2025, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada classified the species as threatened in that country.
There are many reasons. The impact of climate change on the Arctic food web is a leading factor in this decline; populations of lemmings, their main breeding season prey source, have plummeted in some regions due to warming winter temperatures. Avian flu, rodenticide poisoning, collisions with vehicles, and loss of habitat are other causes for decline. Snowy owls face a challenging future.
How can we continue to enjoy and celebrate these magnificent owls through photography, while keeping them as safe as possible? Following are suggestions that are rooted in respect, conservation, and science.
Using live mice to bait snowy owls (or any owl) for photographs habituates the owl to humans, and raises the risk that it will come to a bad end. (©Melissa Groo)
BAITING
Never feed snowy owls to get the shot.
Feeding owls quickly habituates them. They lose their essential wildness, and begin to associate all humans with food, causing them to fly directly toward humans or vehicles; owls are often hit by cars. Teaching them to approach humans is also a risk when they return to their breeding grounds in the Arctic regions of North America, where Indigenous groups have a long and traditional history of hunting them for food and feathers.
Commercially sold mice and hamsters can harbor diseases that wild birds have no defense against, such as salmonella, which is commonly found in pet store mice.
If you happen to come upon a situation where others are feeding owls for photography, refuse to participate. Photograph license plates and people if it’s apparent owls are being harassed, and report to local wildlife authorities.
Steer clear of owl photography tours and workshops that rely on luring owls with food. Ask your workshop leader before signing up: Do you or anyone else bait the owls that we will be photographing? Have they been habituated to people by prior feeding? There are increasing reports of set-ups where a workshop leader partners with a landowner—often a farmer—paying them to feed the owls wintering on their land, in advance of the clients arriving, so that the owls are tame and approach willingly when the clients are on site, expecting to be fed.
Moving slowly and quietly, approaching at an angle, and backing off if the owl is showing agitation, all can eventually come together to make a good, ethical photograph. (©Melissa Groo)
FIELD TECHNIQUES
Keep voices low and movements slow. Remember that owls’ senses are much keener than ours, and being quiet and careful will lessen our disturbance.
Approach slowly, at an angle rather than directly, and stop frequently to assess the behavior of the owl. Are her eyes getting wider? Is she rapidly moving her head back and forth as if deciding where to fly? In essence, if the owl is paying attention to you, you’re probably too close.
If so, stop, and sit if possible. Patience is the name of the game. The more you can tune into her behavior and adjust yours to make her at ease, the more time you’ll have with her. Best of all, if you can photograph from inside a car, do so — it will act as a blind, especially if you keep your voice down and minimize movement through the open window.
Never approach an owl with the intention of getting it to fly so you can get that flight shot. Rest is critical to an owl’s health and survival. Typically in winter, snowy owls rest by day, and get more active as dusk falls.
If the owl continues to move away from you, best to leave her alone.
If it feels like there’s too many other people present, consider not joining the crowd and adding further stress to the owl.
Never trespass on private land to get the shot. Landowners may resent the attention an owl brings, which has caused problems for the owls themselves in a few cases.
AFTER THE SHOT
Some people don’t post the exact location of snowy owls on eBird because they are a “sensitive species,” meaning sharing their location can lead to harassment from excessive crowds of birders and photographers. This can cause significant stress to the owls, and disrupt their ability to hunt and conserve energy for survival. Many Facebook bird photography pages now ban snowy owl images because of the pressure it creates for individual owls.
When you share the photo with others, consider naming the general region you photographed the owl rather than a specific location. Resist pressure from people who contact you wanting the exact location. You have no way of knowing how their actions will affect the bird, or who else they might tell.
If the photos themselves might give away the location to others, then avoid posting them until the animal has moved on.
When you share your photo, describe the precautions you took to avoid disturbing it. This helps to educate others about how to follow ethical practices when they themselves are in the field.
The final litmus test — if you feel uneasy about how you got the shot, and wouldn’t feel good telling others about it, that’s a good sign that you shouldn’t post the photo. And that you might want to make a different choice next time.
–Melissa Groo
Further Reading
Why You Shouldn’t Feed or Bait Owls
Why Baiting Owls Is Not the Same as Feeding Backyard Birds
Tips for Being a Responsible Bird Photographer in the Social Media Age
11 Comments on “The Do’s — and Definite Don’t’s — of Snowy Owl Photography”
Excellent Recommendations ! Can a person be arrested or sighted for baiting owls ?
Thank you !
Snowy owls are not protected under the Migratory Birds Convention Act. They are also not on the “List of wildlife species at risk.” There does not appear to be any regulation that can be enforced against baiting snowy owls.
Regulations vary between states, provinces and countries, obviously. Baiting could result in a serious fine in, say, a U.S. national park or national wildlife refuge, but not on private property, and activists trying to stop baiting for commercial photo tours in some places where it is rampant, in Ontario and Québec, have come up against a lack of applicable provincial regulations, even though the authorities privately admit it’s a problem. The tricky aspect is that feeding wild birds is generally not a crime (and rarely a hazard to the birds), and when well-meaning legislators have tried to address the owl-baiting problem, as happened in Minnesota in 2014, hastily written laws designed to bar owl baiting can wind up inadvertently making it a crime to hang a backyard sunflower seed feeder for the chickadees.
Thank you Melissa for this article. I think it would cover a wide audience if it was sent to local papers. I would like to share it with the public in my area but I would like your permission to do so.
MaryBeth, absolutely. I would really appreciate it if it got out far and wide. Thank you!
I’m seconding Melissa on this — please, feel free to repost and share, though please link to Project SNOWstorm and Melissa in case people want more information.
Great article, excepting this sentence:
“Teaching them to approach humans is also a risk when they return to their breeding grounds in the Arctic regions of North America, where Indigenous groups have a long and traditional history of hunting them for food and feathers.“
This information serves no purpose other than to betray your personal bias towards Indigenous lifeways. It does not provide meaningful or relevant information.
Not disrupting an animal and their natural life is reason enough; no need to scapegoat the folks who’ve stewarded these spaces for time immemorial in order to motivate colonizers to behave ethically.
Hope to see an edit.
Jenny, I appreciate you’re taking me to task on this, though I had hoped that by stressing the “long and traditional history” I was making clear that I wasn’t criticizing Indigenous people for hunting snowy owls, and certainly did not intent to scapegoat anyone. In fact, I think one of the most important advances for both conservation and social justice is the Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area movement in Canada, through which First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities are exerting control over the stewardship of their ancestral lands at extraordinary scale, like the proposed Seal River Watershed IPCA in Manitoba that will safeguard a pristine watershed the size of Nova Scotia. Seal River Land Guardians like Lianna Anderson, whom I had the chance to spend a week with two years ago when she and several other Guardians were in Maine, are using traditional ecological knowledge along with Western science (in that case, in partnership with the National Audubon Society) to document the critical importance of their land for billions of migratory birds.
I apologize for not being clearer in what I was trying to convey.
Thank you very much for spreading the word on proper behaviour around owls – most especially proper behaviour for birders and photographers.
I don’t suppose we can insist that everyone read the rules before they are allowed to buy binoculars – or especially before they are allowed to own a camera??
Steve LaForest
Pickering Naturalists
Thank you Melissa for your timely advice. Further on accessing the right to bird on someone’s property. This is not permission to invite your friends or tell others who are searching in that area, unless the land owner gives general access. This can lead farmers, who are already spooked when vehicles stop on the road close to their property, to deny all further access. How would I feel if someone had their binoculars trained on my house? Let’s use respect.
Link to CBC story on this being an irruption winter for snowy owls due to number of young owls moving southward. https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/snowy-owl-irruption-9.7004977