Welcome, Aimé (and an Update from Fond du Lac)

Scott WeidensaulUpdates2 Comments

Our first newly tagged snowy of the 2021-22 season has already demonstrated she’s a stubborn owl. Aimé — an adult female trapped at the Montréal-Trudeau Airport in Québec by Falcon Environmental, and tagged by Dr. Guy Fitzgérald at the University of Montréal, was relocated about 80 km (50 miles) across the St. Lawrence to farmland near the town of Saint-Aimé … Read More

Badger’s Last Flight

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Last summer, I got a short, enigmatic — but very exciting — email. ” I found a white box that says to contact you if found. The number on it is 57726.” In July, Jeremy Estes and a buddy were supposed to go diving in the cold, clear waters of Lake Superior around Manitou Island, a few miles off the … Read More

Snowy Owl Science, Communicated

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There’s a saying that science isn’t science until it’s communicated. We have always tried to share our findings in an easily accessible way with the general public, since that’s where 100 percent of Project SNOWstorm’s funding comes from. But it’s just as important for us to get our rigorous analyses and research into the scientific literature through conference presentations and, … Read More

We Fly Because of You

Scott WeidensaulUpdates3 Comments

We realize that with Giving Tuesday upon us, you have many demands for your attention and your generosity. At Project SNOWstorm, we stretch every penny to the breaking point, performing ground-breaking science to understand and conserve snowy owls, funded entirely by small, tax-deductible donations from the general public. No one on the SNOWstorm team takes a salary or a stipend … Read More

Two More Returnees!

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Snowy owls have been making headlines this past week, as more and more have been appearing in the upper Midwest, around the Great Lakes, throughout the St. Lawrence River valley and down the Northeast coast to Long Island. One showed up last week on the roof of a school in Goochland, Virginia, just west of Richmond, where snowies are extremely … Read More

Snowies in Spain

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A tip of the hat to our International Snowy Owl Working Group colleague Roar Solheim in Norway for this story about Spain’s first (and second, and third) snowy owls ever recorded. Interestingly, during the mega-irruption in 2013-14 there were similar reports of snowy owls near major European ports like Amsterdam, and quite a few accounts of owls on cargo ships in … Read More

A New Season, and Old Friends Return

Scott WeidensaulUpdates17 Comments

Welcome back, everyone, to the start of Project SNOWstorm’s eighth season of snowy owl tracking and research — and the timing is perfect, because in the past few days we’ve heard from three of our returning snowies, back south after a summer in the Arctic and subarctic. We also have news on what a fourth owl — Otter, who has … Read More

Meet Andrea Brown, Our Newest Collaborator

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One of the best things about Project SNOWstorm has been the opportunity for us to work with up-and-coming young biologists. We’d like to introduce you all to one of those energetic collaborators: Andrea Brown, a 25-year-old from Montréal, Québec. Andrea started her undergraduate honors thesis, supervised by McGill University professor Dr. Kyle Elliott, and McGill Ph.D. candidate Rebecca McCabe (herself … Read More

A Springtime Push is Underway

Scott WeidensaulUpdates3 Comments

Even though it’s snowing today here in New Hampshire, in recent weeks spring has been pushing hard into much of the northern United States and southern Canada, and with its arrival many of our tagged owls have been on the move. A few — as happens every year — simply vanished, likely having moved rapidly from their winter territories and … Read More

Tom McDonald Receives Project SNOWstorm’s Lifetime Achievement Award

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It is with both deep pleasure and profound respect that we announce the selection of Tom McDonald of Rochester, New York, as the recipient of Project SNOWstorm’s first lifetime achievement award for advancing our understanding of snowy owls. Tom’s name will be familiar to anyone who has been following Project SNOWstorm. He became one of our most important collaborators in … Read More