Pickford — a female we tagged last winter as a first-winter immature last season on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan — has been playing hide-and-seek with us for months. The last time we heard from her in the spring was May 29, when she was heading north along the western shore of James Bay. Her transmitter connected with a cell … Read More
Introducing Coddington
We’re pleased to introduce our newest owl — “Coddington,” an adult male tagged Jan. 3, 2019, on the Buena Vista grasslands in central Wisconsin by Gene Jacobs, and named for a nearby town. Coddington weighed nearly 1,700 g (3.75 lbs.), a healthy weight for a male, which tend to weigh a third or less that of an average female snowy. … Read More
Familiar Faces
The past few weeks have been fairly quiet on the surface, but there’s been a lot of activity behind the scenes — and some exciting news about old friends. A number of Project SNOWstorm team members have been out trapping, trying to deploy transmitters. In North Dakota, Matt Solensky has been trying to follow up tagging Woodworth by targeting a … Read More
New Paper from SNOWstorm and Colleagues
Since we started Project SNOWstorm five years ago, one of our major aims has been not only to share our findings with the public, but to disseminate them in the scientific literature as well. The latest in our series of publications has just appeared in the prestigious journal Ibis, looking at the age composition of snowy owl irruptions, and comparing … Read More
Heading for the Line
I often tell groups to whom I’m speaking about Project SNOWstorm that virtually every one of the owls we’ve tagged has surprised us in some fashion. And that’s certainly the case now, as we watch two owls in the same general region heading in opposite directions. After more than a month and a half near Melfort in central Saskatchewan, Pettibone … Read More
How We Use Your Funding
As we’ve mentioned more than once, the only reason Project SNOWstorm exists is you — the folks who have supported our work from the very beginning five years ago. So as we wind down 2018 — and as many of you are making end-of-the-year donations to your favorite charities — we want to both thank you and show you that … Read More
Staying in the Arctic
As regular followers of Project SNOWstorm know, we did something this past summer that no one has ever done before — tagged juvenile snowy owls in the nest with satellite tags, so we can see where young birds go in their first winter. SNOWstorm team member Jean-François Therrien from Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, who tagged the trio in Alaska, has this … Read More
Out on the Prairies
Some wander, some stay; that’s always the pattern every winter with our snowy owls, and it makes our work interesting. Woodworth, the second-year male tagged earlier this month by Matt Solensky in eastern North Dakota, has been on a bit of a walkabout. On Dec. 14 he began moving north from his capture location near his namesake town in Stutsman … Read More
A New Look for Our Maps!
From the beginning, one of the most exciting aspects of Project SNOWstorm has been our interactive maps, which allow everyone — not just those of us with access to the raw tracking data — to follow every move that our tagged owls make. Those Tracker Maps were the brainchild of Don Crockett from Connecticut, who contacted us shortly after we … Read More
Woodworth Joins the Flock
One of our goals this winter is to get more movement data on snowy owls in the Great Plains, to complement the larger data set we have for the Great Lakes and Northeast — which is we’re especially pleased that our colleague Matt Solensky just tagged the first owl of the 2018-19 season in eastern North Dakota. “Woodworth” — named … Read More