Project SNOWstorm is grateful for all the support over the past two seasons and we are looking forward to an exciting 3rd season! Check back in next month as we blog more about the Snowy Owl research that has led to the Project SNOWstorm collaboration, the researchers at the heart of those projects, and more about what we hope … Read More
On the Shoulders of Giants
Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of periodic looks at the history of winter Snowy Owl research, and profiles of some of the long-standing researchers who are part of the Project SNOWstorm team. In this installment, Dave Brinker shares the story of Operation Snowy Owl in the 1960s. After two winters, Project SNOWstorm has accomplished a … Read More
A New Face, and an Old Friend
The 2015-16 season of Project SNOWstorm is off to an exciting start, with our first new owl of the winter — and the return of one of the very first snowies that we tagged two years ago. New bird first…on Dec. 8, SNOWstorm collaborator (and longtime snowy owl researcher) Tom McDonald of Rochester, NY, caught an adult female snowy on … Read More
A Big Year? The View from the Arctic
Again this summer, I was part of a crew heading up North to one of the primary snowy owl breeding grounds in the Eastern Canadian Arctic. There, from mid-May to late-August, a team of 25 to 40 people from all spheres of research (plant, mammal and bird biologists, field assistants as well as local Inuit) devoted themselves to studying every … Read More
A Quiet Winter? Hardly!
Welcome back to Project SNOWstorm. Our last update was back in early May, when only one of our tagged snowy owls was still far enough south to be in cell range. That bird, Chippewa, headed north around May 1, and since then all’s been quiet, as the snowies returned to the Arctic breeding grounds. We’ve been busy since then — … Read More
Last Owl Standing?
Thursday and Friday were a one-two punch for our transmitters. Thursday evening was the regularly scheduled check-in cycle, about 8 p.m. EDT. And the units are also programmed to do an “emergency” check on the first of each month. No matter how thin the reception, regardless of whether there’s enough connectivity to actually transmit data, they’re supposed to send the … Read More
The View from Paradise
It may look and feel like spring in a lot of places, but on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan there’s more than a little bit of winter still hanging on. The spruce woods are full of old, crusted snow drifts, while the portion of Lake Superior that wraps around Whitefish Point is still jammed with immense expanses of ice, thick … Read More
Alma and Monocacy
One of the frustrating aspects of the kind of telemetry study we’re doing with Project SNOWstorm is losing track of an animal. Sometimes we find out what happened, like the two tagged snowy owls last winter that were swamped by a nor’easter and drowned on the Massachusetts coast. Other times we don’t. Two birds that have been longstanding puzzles this … Read More
Go North, Young Owl (and the Old Ones, Too)
Although it’s been more than a week since the last post, we’ve been really busy — and so have the owls, which is why this is a long post. We’re seeing some spectacular spring flights, and hearing from owls that have been off the grid for a while. And the grid — that is, the extent of the GSM cellular … Read More
All Kinds of Shaking Going On
Spring is really working on our tagged owls — even if 35 square miles of ice, up to eight feet thick, doesn’t sound much like spring to you. Up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where the snow is still waist-deep in places, Chippewa has finally budged from her winter-long home territory, where she’s been burning a hole in the … Read More