It may look and feel like spring in a lot of places, but on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan there’s more than a little bit of winter still hanging on. The spruce woods are full of old, crusted snow drifts, while the portion of Lake Superior that wraps around Whitefish Point is still jammed with immense expanses of ice, thick … Read More
Alma and Monocacy
One of the frustrating aspects of the kind of telemetry study we’re doing with Project SNOWstorm is losing track of an animal. Sometimes we find out what happened, like the two tagged snowy owls last winter that were swamped by a nor’easter and drowned on the Massachusetts coast. Other times we don’t. Two birds that have been longstanding puzzles this … Read More
Go North, Young Owl (and the Old Ones, Too)
Although it’s been more than a week since the last post, we’ve been really busy — and so have the owls, which is why this is a long post. We’re seeing some spectacular spring flights, and hearing from owls that have been off the grid for a while. And the grid — that is, the extent of the GSM cellular … Read More
All Kinds of Shaking Going On
Spring is really working on our tagged owls — even if 35 square miles of ice, up to eight feet thick, doesn’t sound much like spring to you. Up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where the snow is still waist-deep in places, Chippewa has finally budged from her winter-long home territory, where she’s been burning a hole in the … Read More
From Great Lake to Great Lake
The latest round of check-ins show that more and more of the tagged snowies are getting the itch to move — some in quite dramatic ways. For instance, Whitefish Point, who has rarely moved more than one section road from her winter territory on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan this winter, took a long ramble on March 31, flying about … Read More