Time for a weekend update on our 2017-18 cohort — the largest we’ve had since our first winter four years ago. We’ll start west and work our way east, but it’s a lot of owls. Ashtabula remains pretty faithful to his general territory near Sanborn, ND, and lately has been spending a lot of time roosting in a grove of … Read More
Dark Owl, White Owl
(To bring you some exciting news from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, we’re turning the microphone over to SNOWstorm collaborator Chris Neri of the Whitefish Point Bird Observatory.) Nova Mackentley and I were thrilled to begin collaborating with Project SNOWstorm in the winter of 2015-16. Working with snowy owls is an amazing experience in and of itself, but to do … Read More
Sinepuxent and a report from the ‘southern’ SNOWstorm
I’ll start with the big news: We’ve tagged the first owl in Maryland since Baltimore was relocated to Assateague Island nearly three years ago. More about her in a moment. It’s been a busy year in the southern range of SNOWstorm activity, in Maryland and Delaware. There are owls farther south but, here in the East, they’ve been few and … Read More
Neighbors
One of the goals we set for ourselves this winter is to track the movements and interactions of neighboring owls, as we did several years ago with Whitefish Point and Chippewa in northern Michigan. So this winter we’ve made an effort to trap and tag snowies in close proximity to one another, starting with Island Beach and Lenape on the … Read More
Bancroft and Austin (and Badger and Arlington and…)
As we mentioned, last week was a busy one at Project SNOWstorm. As we were adding two newly tagged owls on Amherst Island in Ontario, we also had two new birds sporting transmitters in Wisconsin, where we’re partnering with a number of organizations to track owls this winter. The newest recruits are: —Bancroft, a juvenile male caught Jan. 16 on … Read More
Back to Amherst
Things are really happening in a whirlwind here these days, and we have a lot of news to share. Today, it’s two newly tagged owls on Amherst Island, one of the most famous owl spots in North America. (I also made an attempt to tag an owl in northeast Ohio, but came up short — that’s a story for another … Read More
Welcoming (Back) Ashtabula
In the wake of Higbee‘s loss, we have some exciting news in this update — great data from our new owls in Wisconsin, evidence that Chickatawbut probably nested last summer in the subarctic, and the unexpected return of Ashtabula. Wait — Ashta-who? If you’re scratching your head and wondering why you can’t recall that particular owl, don’t worry. This is … Read More
Losing Higbee
For the second time this winter, we’ve lost a tagged owl — Higbee, one of the three juvenile males we’ve come to think of as the “Jersey Boys.” And while the immediate cause was a vehicle collision, it occurred during an historically big coastal storm that we initially believed all three owls had survived. We became aware that something was … Read More
Badger and Arlington Take the Stage
We have two new owls to introduce — and a heck of story about how they were tagged, despite some of the worst weather this winter. They are Badger and Arlington, and both are in Wisconsin. That represents a return to SNOWstorm’s roots, in a way, because the second owl we ever tagged in 2013, Buena Vista, was caught in … Read More
West is Best
Just a quick follow-up on my post about the huge Eastern storm and its potential impact on snowy owls. I heard from our friend, photographer and self-described beach bum “Northside Jim” Verhagen, who blogs about the birdlife along the Holgate unit of Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge on the New Jersey coast — and who corrected me about the way the … Read More