As longtime SNOWstorm followers know, one benefit of our project is finding ways to help airport officials and federal wildlife agencies learn how snowy owls relate to airports. (Because airports look a little like the Arctic, at least to an owl — flat, open and treeless — they tend to be magnets for the birds.) Last year we cooperated with Maine Wildlife Services, … Read More
A Close Call, and a Tourist Owl
A few days after the new year had started, birders found a snowy owl in the rolling farmlands and woodlots of Bradford County in northeastern Pennsylvania, not far below the New York line. Because relatively few snowies show up in this area, the bird became a minor local celebrity, with half a dozen or more birders and photographers lined up … Read More
Oswego Joins the Crew
Sorry for the silence — I’ve been leading a birding tour out of the country the past week and a half, but things were hopping at Project SNOWstorm while I was off the grid. The big news is that we have our first newly tagged owl of 2017, caught by Tom McDonald on Jan. 19 at Oswego Harbor in upstate New … Read More
All Over the Map
There’s been a lot going on behind the scenes at Project SNOWstorm since the beginning of the year — though not always the working out the way we hoped or expected, which is often the way things go with wildlife. Here’s an update on what we’ve been up to. * * * * * We continue to track the movements of … Read More
Tom’s 500th
SNOWstorm team member Tom McDonald’s been on a tear since the tail end of December, when a lot of snowies moved into northern and central New York. A bander like Tom never knows what that might mean. On Jan. 2, for instance, he got a call from a birder that there was an injured snowy owl in a field … Read More
Challenge Match from the Bobolink Foundation!
What an incredible show of support! In just a few weeks, people across North America have contributed to Project SNOWstorm with such generosity that we’re already more than 70 percent of the way to our goal of funding this year’s snowy owl research. Thank you so much. Now we have some even more exciting news to share. The Bobolink … Read More