From Cape Coral Friends of Wildlife
Check out the winners below, and there are 8 more honorable mention winners at the non-social.media hosted link above!
Adult Winners:
1st Place – Conrad Peloquin
2nd Place – Damon Bell
3rd Place – Robert K. Brinley
Youth Winners:
1st Place – Adalynn Miller
2nd Place – August Lambert
3rd Place – Josh Pilon
Squeeee!!
I approve Burrowing Owl as OotY 2026, so let’s just go ahead and do that. ;)
The Burrowing Owl people have been very passionate and vocally upset both times. They’re perennially favorites, much like the love the Snowy gets, but the little guys haven’t been able to get that final push over the top. They certainly have what it takes though!
I know. We’re all Burrowing until Buffy Fish shows up and then everybody scatters.
I don’t remember the number offhand, but I expected Buffy to fair better, but I think a number of its fans have dropped off Lemmy or the community.
White Face seemed ready to steamroll everyone, which surprised me, as I don’t get too much WFS content to keep the momentum high compared to some others.
I love the surprises, and I’m glad we’ve had different winners both times so far. I wouldn’t be upset if one won twice, but I’d personally prefer not to have the same one win back to back. My goal is to get you guys excited about new things!
Some are always going to be more popular, but I wouldn’t want this place to just be the same 3 owls every day. With 250 to choose from, there’s gotta be a few more I can get you all pumped up about! 😁
Yeah WFS is a contender for sure. I think there should be a rule that past winners can’t be considered for, like, 10 years or something. Not that Saw Whet doesn’t deserve to win every year but just like you said - keep it different.
I think the bracket did its job pretty well last year since I had the prior year’s popularity numbers to work with. The popular ones got to the finals, as they should, but it got progressively harder for them to stay in. At least half the bracket was competitive to the point if any of the top 50% had won, nobody would be too upset about it. Here’s the bracket and score comparison post for reference. Even some of the newer ones that did poorly have been becoming more popular this year like Philippine/Indian Scops and Mottled Wood Owl.
Also Snowy frustration is as high as Burrow Owl frustration. Snowy is one I thought would dominate both times, and it did soooo well, but then you get people coming out like, nah, he gets enough attention as it is, so you get that spoiler effect which is exciting to see. Kicking someone out from the start would kill initial excitement IMO. If you’re a die hard for someone like WFS and it has zero chance of winning, I can see you not participating, but if you get invested, even if it gets bumped, you still want to see the one who knocked it out get taken down.
I don’t think I have any planned tweaks from last year at this moment, as I thought last year went near perfect, but I’m always thinking about it.
My favorite was in the honorable mentions. It really captured that annoying sibling vibe lol.
“Just act like we don’t know him!” 😆
