Might You Have a “Snowy Owl Counting Problem”?
Noah Strycker’s 2014 book The Thing With Feathers: The Surprising Lives of birds and What They Reveal About Being Human, offers some quite-astonishing insights about the world of birds, and what scientists are learning about the avian world. I was particularly intrigued to read a whole section on snowy owls, and specifically on how a kind of urban legend, as it were, about snowy owls, has turned out to be pretty much baseless.
So, snowy owls mostly live on the Arctic tundra, and descend to the Midwest of the United States only during what are called “irruptions,” when their populations suddenly surge. As Strycker, who is associate editor of the American Birding Association’s flagship magazine Birder, notes in this book, writing about an irruption that took place during the 2011-2012 season, “The cool thing about the 2012 irruption was that it was so well documented. Thanks to eBird, a website where birders can log their sightings on one comprehensive database, people anywhere can look at the snowy owl invasion on their own computer screens.”
But the key element of this is this: “As for snowy owls,”Strycker writes, “the more we learn about them the more we know we don’t know. In 1945, ornithologist V.E. Shelford published a short paper suggesting that snowy owls fly south in years following population crashes of their main Artcic food sources, the collared lemming. Sometimes lemmings breed so fast that their population skyrockets, and then they disperse in search of more sparsely occupied territory. This phenomenon has led to the false but widespread notion that lemmings commit mass suicide by jumping blindly over cliffs, but it also means that their populations are somewhat cyclic. Shelford gathered data on lemming and snowy owl numbers, plotted them on a graph together, and believed he detected a pattern.”
Strycker wrote that “It seemed logical. After lemming populations crashed, snowy owls would have less to eat and might have to head south in search of food. Shelford’s paper, which had cobbled together data from several different sources, didn’t spend much space elaborating on specifics. The idea was easy for anyone to understand, quickly accepted, and used as a textbook example of population dynamics for decades.” On the other hand, he wrote, “The trouble is that there’s little hard evidence to support Shelford’s theory. It’s difficult to prove that invasions follow any kind of cycle; different people look at graphs of snowy owl occurrences in the continental United States and see different things.” And the patterns around both snowy owl irruptions and lemming population cycles are turning out to be very complicated things. In other words, contemporary researched has forced everyone to reconsider a long-held set of beliefs; and that, of course, is how science works, as scientists constantly revise existing theories based on observation and experimentation.
That’s true, of course, as well in the operations of patient care organizations in the U.S. As Senior Contributing Editor David Raths and Managing Editor Janette Wider note in their cover story in this issue, much experimentation is taking place now with regard to developing the chief patient experience officer position in hospitals and health systems, and we are in early days. No consistent pattern has yet evolved in terms of the specific professional background for these individuals, where they sit in the organization, and so on. Over time, some kind of consistent pattern will emerge, but this is a time of trial-and-error-based experimentation; and that’s OK.
Meanwhile, the snowy owl/collared lemming situation reminds us all to remain humble, as we move forward with our own experimentation in health care operations—always a good lesson.
