Across most of the Arctic, one small rodent decides whether a certain white, yellow-eyed predator has a good year or a bad one. On the island where this bird has quietly made its home, that rodent does not exist at all, and yet the bird has found a way to survive regardless.
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The snowy owl usually depends heavily on lemmings. In places like northern Canada and Scandinavia, lemming numbers rise and fall in cycles, and owls often skip breeding entirely in years when lemmings are scarce. Iceland has no native lemmings whatsoever, which by that logic should make it a poor place for the species to live, let alone raise young.
Researchers who studied the diet of Iceland’s owls, by examining what they had coughed up near their nests, found the birds had quietly rewritten their own rulebook. Birds, not rodents, made up almost all of what they ate. The rock ptarmigan, a local grouse-like bird, was their single most common prey, alongside various shorebirds and, occasionally, young Arctic foxes and wood mice.
Breeding snowy owls remain extremely rare in Iceland, seen only occasionally and in scattered locations, with birdwatchers often keeping active nest sites confidential to protect them. Elsewhere the species has become rarer still. A pair once bred successfully on a Scottish island for eight years, but the male never returned after 1976, and no snowy owl is known to have bred anywhere in Britain or Ireland since 2001.
Unlike most owls, snowy owls hunt by day rather than at night, a habit shaped by the near-constant daylight of Arctic summers. In Iceland, that same adaptability—hunting when the light allows and eating whatever is actually available—appears to be exactly what has kept a small, quiet population going in a place its usual food chain says it should not be.