Let’s get real, folks. The ABA “rules” are guidelines, and the "no feeding raptors” part was meant to suggest that photographers and trip leaders (mostly) who would bait raptors for their own purposes and financial gain shouldn’t be doing that.  You and I both know that the vast majority of snowy owls coming down from Canada  will starve to death this winter due to their inability to find suitable prey in suitable quantity to sustain them. The snowys are dumber than a box of rocks most of the time and the normal densities of their northern prey, such as lemmings and arctic voles, are higher where they came from than the densities of anything on the Cleveland Breakwall or almost anywhere else down here. And we have more snow than the place they came from. Hunting’s easier there, tho perhaps a bit more windy and dark.  Do folks REALLY think the break wall and airport are crawling with big tasty rats 365/24/7?  The Ohio open field habitat matches their natal habitat, so that’s where they sit and patiently hunt, or try to, and eventually most starve to death. They already arrive stressed and underweight.  My personal sense of birding ethics says that if Joe has a snowy owl out in the boondocks where no one else will mob it with cameras and bins, and he wants to feed the thing, then BRAVO to Joe for doing it. Should it be done on Burke’s runways? Probably not.  This no doubt sounds like “situational ethics” to some of you, and I freely admit that it is, but I for one am not offended by Joe’s feeding “his” snowy owl any more than I object to you putting suet out for your Carolina wrens. Blind obedience to a set of “rules” without questioning the context in which they were created is folly. And Joe, I second the opinion of a previous poster. Just don’t tell anyone next time.

Bob Hinkle
Chief Naturalist Emeritus
Solon, Ohio
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