A snowy owl, a refugee from the Arctic, lit atop a church at the end of my street last Tuesday and drew a crowd.

I came to work Wednesday and wrote a short story that became, for a while, one of our most e-mailed. Readers of post-gazette.com also were clicking on video footage provided by JaeHee Cho, the coordinator of "Science in Your Neighborhood" for the Carnegie Science Center. He had driven up the hill to the Beech Avenue church with four Perry High School students on their way to an after-school program on Brighton Road.

Pittsburghers will come out and see what we don't expect to see, be it Barack Obama, John McCain or a snowy owl. This has been only the third snowy owl known to fly into our city since 1981, and this young female wasn't in any hurry to leave.

It was gone from my neighborhood by Wednesday morning but, rather than flying north to where the weather suits it, the big white bird flew across the Allegheny River to Point State Park. Our photographer, Rebecca Droke, took a nice shot of it, scaring crows off a tree branch there Thursday afternoon, which would have been at least its third day in town.

Hard-core birders were chippering about this on the Three Rivers Birding Club Web site on Friday afternoon, wondering if its dallying made it worth a trip Downtown.

I walked the rim of the rainy park Friday morning but saw only geese and robins. A worker told me he'd seen the owl the day before and it looked as big as any of the Canada geese that flock there.

Not that this bird can't be intimidated. Steve Sarro, director of animal programs at the National Aviary, had told me it probably had been driven south by older birds when prey grew scarce in the great white north.

It seems adult birds there essentially tell their young, "The lemmings are running low, kid. Beat it." Next thing you know this owl is posing for a postcard from the Point.

Julia Ecklar, registrar for the aviary, said migrating birds often lay over for a week or two. Though our weather has been anything but Arctic, she wasn't shocked that the owl delayed its return across the Canadian border.

"Nature is not real cut and dried,'' Ms. Ecklar said. "Birds don't look at a calendar and say, 'I'm not supposed to stay until this date.' ''

This one could be getting by on chipmunks, squirrels, rats and such. As Stephen P. Rogers, collection manager of the Section of Birds at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, joked in an e-mail, "Why leave a place if the food is good? Was the owl seen at Primanti's yet?"

The snowy owl is a striking creature in all senses of the word. A great, silent hunter, it snaps up prey before they can hear the owl coming. And its coloration, which can be described the same way one would the heavy kid in the Willy Wonka movie -- white with prominent chocolate bars -- makes it stand out in a city with trees still darkly bare.

Nobody expects this owl to stay much longer, if it hasn't already left. Though migration decisions are "one of those great, big, cool mysteries of biology,'' Ms. Ecklar said, this bird would be bucking nature if it stayed much longer.

The bird hasn't evolved to handle warm weather, Mr. Sarro said. At less than a year old, it is too young to breed this year, but it will nonetheless be drawn back to where it was born and raised, where it will be among its own kind. Nesting begins in mid-May, so it has only five weeks to fly back to the top of the world.

Mr. Cho, who shot the video, believes we're drawn to "what hasn't been tamed and contained by us.''

Wildness is a respite from the harsh news of money, drugs and mayhem -- and that's just the Sports section. The unemployment rate is as high as it's been in 25 years, but we can still look up and see something beautiful and free. Creatures will go to great lengths to survive and I, for one, call that hopeful.