Last weekend I saw someone's photos of snowy owls and I couldn't wait for the working week to finish so I could go and see them again myself. They last made an appearance in 2005/2006 at which time we had our little point-and-shoot camera. We have no photos from that time as we imagined that all we'd see were a couple of distant white dots (much like our bald eagle spotting in Maryland). We were wrong, and we were treated to the sight of the owls very close to the dyke. When I went down there today, it was the same deal: a couple of snowy owls sitting on a log, barely 10 m from a crowd of gawking photographers (I swear some of those lenses were long enough to poke the poor birds from that distance... ;-) I counted another half-a-dozen owls out on the marshes, and I was disappointed to see yet more people out there lugging their huge lenses and tripods around to get a close-up shot of one of the owls. I have no doubt that they would have got as close (or closer) had they stayed up on the dyke. A couple of times I saw owls take flight - a big no-no when doing any form of wildlife watching. If they react to you by moving further away, you're too close.
I kept to the dyke and snapped away with our tiny 55-200 mm lens. Compared with much of the weaponry I saw out there today, our camera still felt like a little point-and-shoot. I came home with over 100 photos of the owls, which spent the entire time sat there like two white bumps on a log. Seriously, the only movement I saw was them swivelling their heads to look around. But at the end of the day, that's a good thing.
Snowy owl
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