Folks who are thinking over the current snowy owl incursion will enjoy reading Gross's engrossing summary in the Auk from three-quarters of a century ago, at https://sora.unm.edu/sites/default/files/journals/auk/v064n04/p0584-p0601.pdf . In the 1945-46 event, for example, 13,502 owls were reported, and 4,443 of them shot. Extended readable and pretty well-authenticated written accounts are missing in the Auk or other professional ornithological venues nowadays, and seem relegated to the popular press. But it would be refreshing to read an account in something other than a brief gee-whiz newspaper story or internet gossip, something with more news like Gross's reports of owls on ships at sea, odd observations on owls' prey, the depredations of gunners, etc. If you wore a raccoon hat, you ran the risk of an owl attack. Too bad we so often have to seek out antique sources to read this sort of thing. Today it's just "I saw an owl at xxxxx location." Gross cites a couple of Ohio accounts, both from Columbus-area experts, in the Literature Cited section of the article cited above; Hicks's article (for 1930-31) is easy to access (search "sora"), but Thomas's (for 1926-27) remains buried in a more obscure publication. But they too both lack much of the allure of a good story, and are mostly just reported numbers. In bygone years, researchers seemingly did a better job overall recording remarkable bird-related events. Modern reporting methodologies like eBird may cast a wider net but have more limited data per sighting, many duplications, and lack comparability with these earlier recordings, not to mention a dearth of interesting anecdotes. Today, we may have better ways to tell if the reasons for incursions might involve too many or too few lemmings, but a lot of the news comes from guys in short sleeves who mostly sit in front of computer screens. As our knowledge becomes more bureaucratic and impersonal, some factors are less public and hard to compare. Next time we go out to tick (or even study!) a snowy owl, let's at least take along someone, especially someone without a checklist, to share it with. Bill Whan Columbus ______________________________________________________________________ Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society. Please consider joining our Society, at www.ohiobirds.org/site/membership.php. Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list. You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at: listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]