A Curious Snowy Owl Keeps Photobombing A Quebec Traffic Camera (PHOTOS)
Why does it look like it knows exactly what it's doing?
Doo-doo, doo-doo-doo, doo-doo, doooo, doo, doo-doo-doo, doo-doooo. There's magic afoot this season, but it's not a movie. A snowy owl keeps photobombing a Quebec traffic camera and it almost looks like it knows exactly what it's doing.
The province's transportation ministry, Transports Québec, says the owl has been appearing almost daily since the beginning of December at the camera overlooking autoroute 55 Sud near the Laviolette bridge in Trois-Rivières.
It's punctual too, consistently showing up between 3:30 and 4:00 p.m., "much to the delight of the telecom attendants at the Trois-Rivières Integrated Traffic Management Center," the ministry says.
And it seems it's bringing joy to the public, as well.
Transports Québec's screenshots from the owl's daily video shoots accumulated over a thousand reactions in one hour on Facebook.
This isn't the first time a snowy owl has shown up on the province's traffic cameras. A similar photo of an owl passing a camera in Montreal made worldwide headlines in 2016.
In March 2020, MTL Blog reported on a snowy owl that appeared to take up residence atop one of the city's dirty snow piles.
At the time, local and brilliantly-named ornithologist David Bird told us the birds migrate south from the Arctic for the winter and seek out flat plains that resemble the tundra — not unlike a wide highway clearing, perhaps.
According to Quebec's Ministry of Forests, Fauna and Parks, snowy owls can reach between 53 and 77 centimetres in height with a wingspan between 132 and 182 centimetres, depending on the animal's sex.