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
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
Nudging North
In the past two weeks, spring has begun to exert itself in many parts of North American (with apologies to our friends in Colorado and Wyoming who just got walloped by an historic snowstorm). But the longer days, higher sun and milder temperatures have prodded some of our tagged owls into migration, and there’s a lot to catch you up … Read More
A New Face (and the First Stirrings of Spring)
It’s been a cold winter across much of central and eastern North America, especially the regions where we have tagged snowies this year, from the northern Great Plains to eastern Canada. But that’s changing, with some dramatic warming underway, and we’re already seeing the start of the spring migration — with one owl in particular that’s made a big leap … Read More
The Return of Argus
Sorry for the silence the past two weeks — as we’ve mentioned before (but it bears repeating), everyone involved in Project SNOWstorm does this on the side as a volunteer. Sometimes our day jobs get hectic enough that other things are delayed, and that’s been the case for me the past few weeks. Thanks for your patience. But we’re leading … Read More
A Long, Long Way from a Mickey D
If you were anywhere near a news feed last week, you know that the biggest snowy owl news didn’t involve one of our tagged birds, but rather the first snowy to appear in New York’s Central Park in 130 years. The owl made a brief appearance on the park’s North Meadows ball fields on Wednesday, Jan. 27, thrilling hordes of … Read More
A Whole Lotta News
Whew! Where to start? It’s been a crazy couple of weeks, and we have a lot of news to cover since the calendar flipped over to 2021. One owl has gone AWOL, one has been recaptured and relieved of his transmitter, and another old friend unexpectedly sent up a signal flare. Let’s start with Dorval, who had been wintering in … Read More
A Yul-etide Visit
We’re delighted to announce that another of our 2019-20 class of owls is back on the grid — Yul, an adult female tagged in November 2019 at Montréal-Trudeau International Airport (aviation call sign: YUL). She was trapped at the airport by Falcon Environmental, fitted with a transmitter by SNOWstorm team member and McGill University Ph.D. student Rebecca McCabe, and relocated … Read More
Testing a New Design
The first winter we launched Project SNOWstorm, we were scrambling to adapt existing technology to a species that had only rarely been fitted with transmitters. The GPS/GSM units we use, which are manufactured by New Jersey-based Cellular Tracking Technologies, are about the size of a small matchbox, with a solar panel on the top. They weigh about 45 grams, or … Read More
What Does Half a Million Owl Locations Look Like?
Since we started Project SNOWstorm seven years ago this month, we’ve tracked more than 90 snowy owls across 28 states and provinces, as far south as Virginia and northwest clear to the edge of the Arctic Ocean — the last land until Siberia. Some of the owls met unfortunate ends relatively soon after we began to track them, most often … Read More