What will likely be the last new SNOWstorm owl of the winter season is watching the world go by from an airport — though fortunately not the biggest, busiest airport she could have chosen. Salvail, as we’ve nicknamed her, is a first-winter female snowy that was trapped at the Trudeau-Montréal airport on Feb. 5, 2025, by our colleagues from Falcon … Read More
Welcome Jolene and Carden
Whether you’re reading this before or after the Big Game, here’s a little Superb Owl news for you all: We have two new snowies to introduce, one of which is in a very familiar place, keeping very familiar company. Jolene and Carden are both first-winter females, both tagged by our stalwart colleagues Charlotte England and Malcolm Wilson of Toronto, as … Read More
Hochelaga (Probably Can’t) Phone Home
One of the challenges with using technology is that it changes. Which is good — the miniaturization of batteries and other tech has allowed scientists to make ever-smaller and lighter transmitters to track ever-smaller and lighter animals. But sometimes technology leaves you behind, and that seems to be what’s happened with one of our veteran owls, Hochelaga. We’ve known for … Read More
No, We’re Not Dyeing Owls Red
On Jan. 24, birder and photographer James Robinson Bill Diller photographed a snowy owl in Huron County, Michigan, that appears to have been liberally coated with some sort of orangish-red paint or dye. After the photos appeared on social media they set off a bit of a firestorm, initially people accusing Robinson of faking them with AI or Photoshop. Others … Read More
Who Has Been Up to What?
Between the holidays, travel and an impending book deadline, I’ve been a little slow with updates this season, for which I apologize. It’s worth mentioning from time to time that all of us at SNOWstorm do this on the side, so sometimes actual work gets in the way. (I hate that.) Starting in the east, Loren has continued to move … Read More
First-ever Global Status Assessment for Snowy Owls Raises Red Flags
For the first time, an assessment of the global conservation status of snowy owls has been completed, confirming that worldwide population was badly overestimated for decades, and indicating that snowy owl populations have declined by roughly a third over the past 25 to 30 years. The major study, which involved dozens of snowy owl researchers from five countries, all part … Read More
Breaking New Ground
For only the second time in Project SNOWstorm’s 11 seasons of telemetry tracking, we’ve fitted a previously injured, rehabilitated snowy owl with a transmitter to document its movements and long-term survival, a project we’ve been working toward for several years at the urging of our team of wildlife veterinarians and the rehabilitation community beyond, which wants to know how well … Read More
An Early Bloomer, and Two Nearly Neighbors
Not one but two alumni owls have come back onto the grid in the past two weeks, with a summer’s worth of wandering — and in one case, an awful lot of wandering — in the memory banks of their transmitters. On Dec. 13 we heard from Loren, who was trapped last January at the Montréal-Trudeau International Airport by the folks … Read More
Two in the North
We have our first returning owl of the 2024-25 season, and an update for you on one that — at least so far — has remained out of cell range, but not entirely off the grid. On Dec. 5 we received our first data transmission from Newton, an adult male that was tagged in January 2023 near Newton, Ontario, by … Read More
What We Raise, How it’s Spent
From the beginning, Project SNOWstorm has taken a very unusual approach to funding raptor research. When we launched SNOWstorm in December 2013, it was on a wing and a prayer, a rapid response to an unprecedented and wholly unexpected mega-irruption of snowy owls, the largest since at least the 1920s. The usual approaches to funding research — writing and submitting … Read More