Rare Snowy Owl Is Causing a Stir in a SoCal Suburb: 'Like Seeing Santa Claus on a Beach'

Los Angeles Times/Getty Snowy Owl

A suburban neighborhood in Southern California received an unlikely visitor: a snowy owl!

On Christmas Day, the rare snowy owl appeared on a roof in the city of Cypress in Orange County. Since then, bird lovers have flocked to marvel over and snap photos of the North Pole native.

"It's like seeing Santa Claus on a beach," Nancy Caruso, a neighbor who saw the owl, told the New York Times. "Like that out of place, but cool."

Per the outlet, neighbors have noticed that the bird takes off around 5 p.m. and reappears sometime later on a different roof.

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Snowy owls are known to migrate from northern Canada to midwestern and northeastern United States during the winter, Lori Arent, the assistant director of the Raptor Center at the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Minnesota told the Times. However, it is "extremely rare" to find one in southern California.

Mark Rightmire/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register/Getty Snowy Owl

"It will be interesting to see how long this bird stays," Arent told the outlet. "The question will be: Will this bird be able to find enough food to eat?"

Chris Spurgeon with the Pasadena Audubon Society told the Los Angeles Times he thinks the rare visitor was blown thousands of miles off course by a storm or cruised into the nearby Long Beach/San Pedro port complex on a freighter.

How long he will stay remains unknown, but for now, his appearance is bringing joy to the neighborhood.

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"The most exciting thing for me is that the public is reacting so positively," Victor Leipzig, who teaches birding at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, California, told the New York Times.

"I was there on Tuesday of this week, and there were people from the local neighborhood who were just thrilled and people who had driven from a hundred miles away to see the bird," he added.