Losing Buckeye

Scott WeidensaulUpdates13 Comments

We’ve seen some major migration to the north this past week, including one owl that is most of the way to James Bay — but the biggest news is the saddest, because we’ve lost one of our oldest and most interesting owls. You’ll recall my relief last week that, having survived a winter at Detroit Metro Airport (DTW), Buckeye was … Read More

The Pull of Spring

Scott WeidensaulUpdates6 Comments

These have been strange and disquieting days for everyone, no less so for those of us with Project SNOWstorm. The global coronavirus pandemic has upended — well, pretty much everything. But even in hard times, owl research goes on. As of now, everyone on the SNOWstorm team is healthy; most are working from home, but some have unfortunately experienced layoffs … Read More

Zugunruhe to You, Too!

Scott WeidensaulUpdates3 Comments

We’re just a few weeks away from the spring equinox, and as the sun creeps higher in the sky and days begin the lengthen dramatically in the northern latitudes, this is when we start to expect some restlessness to set in among our tagged owls. And that’s exactly what’s been happening the past couple of weeks. It’s not a rush … Read More

Good News Across the Board

Scott WeidensaulUpdates9 Comments

The news this week is good. Several owls that had been in dicey places have moved (or, in one case, been moved) to safer locales. Buckeye is, at least, keeping to the less busy parts of Detroit Metro Airport, and after a month on the lam, Pearl is back on the grid, with more than a thousand GPS points tracing … Read More

City Owl, Country Owl

Scott WeidensaulUpdates15 Comments

While the big news lately has been Wolverine losing his transmitter and Buckeye getting hers, our other tagged owls have been keeping us busy, watching their movements, worrying abouy them and trying — as we always do — the better understand the ecology of these birds through their tracking data. Of our two owls in southern Québec, only Otter is … Read More

Where to Begin? How About With Buckeye 2.0?

Scott WeidensaulUpdates3 Comments

I’m not sure where to start. Maybe with an apology; the lapse in recent updates hasn’t been a reflection of a lack of news, but a lack of time. As we’ve noted before, everyone involved with SNOWstorm is a volunteer, and sometimes our paying jobs get in the way. In my case, a couple of big deadlines, combined with a … Read More

Wolverine and Redwood

Scott WeidensaulUpdates9 Comments

Some folks were taking it easy over the holidays, but not the Project SNOWstorm crew — and as a result, we have two newly tagged snowy owls to tell you about. Selena Creed must have a thing about working holidays. She’s the wildlife biologist at Detroit Metro Airport (DTW) who caught Buckeye on Christmas Eve, allowing us to recover his … Read More

Buckeye Returns!

Scott WeidensaulUpdates18 Comments

Sometimes Santa comes just a little bit early. On Tuesday, as my wife and I were rushing to meet her family for a Christmas Eve gathering, we got an email and an urgent message through Facebook from Selena Creed, a wildlife biologist at Detroit Metropolitan Airport (DTW) in Michigan. She’d just caught a snowy owl on the runway — and … Read More

Wampum’s Gone

Scott WeidensaulUpdates4 Comments

Dancing around bad news never makes it any easier to give or receive, so I’ll simply say that we lost an owl last week, and it still feels like a punch to the gut. It was Wampum, the adult female who had been playing with fire much of the winter at several New England airports. She was found dead Thursday … Read More

Buckeye’s Bonanza

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One of the most exciting developments this winter was the unexpected reappearance on Feb. 22 of Buckeye, our first Ohio snowy owl, tagged last winter after being relocated from the Detroit airport. Her transmitter quickly uploaded a new configuration designed to maximize battery power and speed the download of her stored data — and that has worked spectacularly well. In … Read More