Get The Wild newsletter. The essential weekly guide to enjoying the outdoors in Southern California. Insider tips on the best of our beaches, trails, parks, deserts, forests and mountains. Enter email address You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. But for the pandemic, I would be flying to New York City to see a snowy owl standing in a Central Park meadow. It’s the first time the Arctic tundra dweller has been seen in the park in130 years. “Wow! A magnificent snowy owl is in NYC! ��,” @Centralparknyc posted on IG. The rare sighting took me back to 2013, when I persuaded my husband to ditch his birthday dinner in favor of careening over to Marina del Rey to see blue-footed boobies that had appeared offshore. We got there just before sunset. Avid birders had set up scopes and invited us to take a look. It was beyond thrilling to see these visitors from Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands.