We expect to see some restlessness as the spring days get longer — even after a major snowstorm, which much of the Northeast this past week. And we saw some of that behavior this time, along with transmissions from a couple of AWOL owls. After skipping a week, Dakota came back online after some sunshine on the Canadian prairies, and … Read More
Time to Head…South?
The past 10 days has been an interesting period, with some unexpected movements, some owls sticking close to their usual haunts, and a couple of absent snowies that may indicate that spring migration is really getting underway (or could just be low batteries). Favret, the adult female tagged in upstate New York by Tom McDonald, had initially moved north to … Read More
Chickatawbut and ISOWG
We’re tracking a new owl at Project SNOWstorm — and she has an unusually distinguished pedigree, given the circumstances of her tagging. She’s a juvenile female named Chickatawbut, captured March 7 at Logan Airport in Boston by SNOWstorm co-founder Norman Smith of Massachusetts Audubon, and released the next day at Salisbury Beach, close to the New Hampshire border. Our newest … Read More
Holding Patterns
It was a pretty quite week on the tracking front, with all of our owls — those still on winter territory, and those that have started to migrate — just biding their time. Out west, Dakota and Chase Lake remain on their respective territories in Saskatchewan and North Dakota. Oswego failed to check in again this week from her namesake … Read More
Say Hello to Favret
The ever-busy Tom McDonald has tagged another snowy, an adult female on the shores of Lake Ontario — Favret, our 47th SNOWstorm owl. Tom caught Favret (that’s pronounced “fav-RAY”) the morning of Feb. 27 on Cape Vincent, at the eastern corner of Lake Ontario, one of the most important wintering areas for snowy owls in that region, and an area … Read More
Coyote Graphics Fundraiser a Success!
Thanks to everyone who made our fundraiser with Michael Boardman and Coyote Graphics in Maine such a big success. You’ll recall that Michael offered to donate $5 to Project SNOWstorm for every owl-themed t-shirt that they sold — and they sold a bunch! By the end of the promotion Feb. 21, SNOWstorm supporters had ordered 90 Coyote shirts, which translates … Read More
Wells is on Her Way
If you live anywhere in the Midwest or East, we don’t have to tell you that the past week was bizarrely warm, with record-high temperatures across a huge swath of the country. That weather — coupled with the longer days — may be having an effect on the snowy owls. And one in particular, because Wells has left the building. … Read More
Catching Chase Lake
It’s been a rather frustrating winter for Matt Solensky, our Project SNOWstorm colleague in North Dakota. His hope (and ours) — that he would be able to quickly trap and tag a couple of prairie-hunting snowy owls this winter — proved to be a little too optimistic. Deep and crusted snow kept the number of owls in eastern North Dakota … Read More
Dakota and Hardscrabble: The Rest of the Story
As we’ve mentioned before, due to some unexplained hiccup the transmitters on our three returnee owls — Dakota, Hardscrabble and Baltimore — all experienced a glitch on Jan. 1, when they stopped downloading their backlogged GPS locations, leaving us without seven or eight months’ worth of stored movement data. Baltimore’s unit subsequently went completely dark (which is why we’ve tried … Read More
All Settled In
An all’s-well report on our cadre of snowies — as of the end of last week, everyone was just where he or she was expected to be. How long it remains that way, though, will be interesting to see. The days are getting longer, which may start nudging up hormone levels in our adult birds, making them restless with the … Read More