Snowy & Great Grey Owls in Calgary, Canada — January 2025
In January 2025 I returned to Calgary in Alberta, Canada for another four days of owl photography with Ken Anderson Photography.
I’d had such a fantastic trip with Ken the previous March that when it began to look like it could be a particularly good winter for Snowy Owls around Calgary, I got back in touch. Fortunately, he was able to fit me in for another four days.
Snowy Owls had been the one disappointment of my previous trip. Despite spending considerable time searching the prairies, we hadn’t managed to find one. This time things were looking much more promising.
As I’d found the previous year, Ken’s knowledge of the area and its owls was invaluable. He’s been photographing them around Calgary for many years and doesn’t use bait to create photographic opportunities — something that’s particularly important to me.
Not quite the Canadian winter I expected
In the weeks leading up to the trip, Calgary had been experiencing some extremely cold weather and I’d been watching the forecast hoping for properly wintry conditions.
Unfortunately, as is often the way when you try to predict the weather, things changed.
The week before I arrived had been bitterly cold, but temperatures rose considerably during my stay, reaching around 11–12°C during the day. Almost inevitably, another spell of extremely cold weather was forecast to arrive shortly after I left.
There also hadn’t been as much snow as usual. Calgary itself was completely snow-free, although thankfully once we travelled further out into the surrounding countryside there was still snow across parts of the landscape.
It wasn’t quite the deep Canadian winter I’d imagined, but wildlife photography rarely gives you exactly the conditions you have in mind.
Snowy and Great Grey Owls
As before, our days started early, with Ken collecting me from the hotel before sunrise.
We decided to divide each day roughly in half between Snowy Owls and Great Grey Owls, alternating between mornings and afternoons with each species. This gave us opportunities to photograph both in different conditions and, hopefully, different light.
The contrast with my previous visit couldn’t have been greater.
Rather than spending hours searching unsuccessfully for a Snowy Owl, we were generally seeing somewhere between five and eight each day.
Snowy Owls can still be remarkably difficult to spot. Sitting motionless across the huge open prairies, a distant bird can appear as little more than a white shape in the landscape. Once you’ve found one, they’re also extremely flighty, so keeping plenty of distance and allowing the owl to dictate the encounter is essential.
Fortunately, over the four days we had some wonderful opportunities.
Alongside the Snowies we were also finding two or three Great Grey Owls most days. Having travelled to Calgary the previous year primarily for Great Greys, it was fantastic to spend more time with them while also finally getting the Snowy Owl encounters I’d been hoping for.
We also found a Barred Owl and a distant Northern Hawk Owl during the trip, adding even more variety to an already very successful few days.
The photographs that went further
I returned home extremely pleased with the images from the trip. After failing to find a single Snowy Owl the previous year, I’d finally been able to spend several days watching and photographing them in their winter environment.
At the time, of course, I had no idea that two of those photographs would eventually go considerably further.
In 2026, BBC Wildlife Magazine licensed two of my Snowy Owl images from this trip for Snowbound — The secret life of the Arctic’s iconic owl, the cover feature in its September 2026 issue.
One of the photographs was used across the opening spread of the feature, with a second appearing later in the article.
Having travelled back to Calgary partly because the Snowy Owls had eluded me the previous year, seeing two photographs from the return trip subsequently published by BBC Wildlife Magazine made the whole experience even more rewarding.
Read about the BBC Wildlife Magazine feature →
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