Snowy owls make a rare appearance in Delta

They are a beautiful, but unusual sight in the Boundary Bay area of Delta.

Snowy owls usually live and breed in Alaska and the Yukon. But this year, they've come south because their food supply of lemmings was lacking.

However, the snowy owls have also been seen even further south from Washington to Illinois and Maine. And believe it or not, one was even spotted as far south as Honolulu.

Here in Delta though, it’s been more than five years since there's been a display of these majestic animals.

Global BC’s Ted Chernecki was out in the area today and counted more than 70 snowy owls at one point.

But these owls may be too cute for their own good. Photographers are flocking to the area and that's worrying people who work at a nearby Birds of Prey Rehabilitation Centre. They’ve already had three snowy owls brought into their facility and they were not in good shape. Two of them died.

“My concern is they have already travelled thousands and thousands of kilometers to get here,” says Bev Day with Orphaned Wildlife Rehabilitation Society. “They’ve left the north for food. That is usually why they migrate. They migrate for prey. So there are already skinny when they get down here. Now, we have people who are going there and want them to fly. They don’t realize how fragile these birds are.”

Some photographers leave the gravel road that sits atop the dike and trample into the marshlands for that "perfect" shot, and Day says it's cause for alarm.

“The habitat that they are running on to get these pictures of snowies,” says Day. “They are destroying it for everything, not just the owls. They are disrupting it.”