We have a new transmittered owl, and the very surprising return of our oldest veteran, back south for the first time in years.

Fulgence, newly cleaned and ready to go, is a first-winter male rescued from a pool of industrial waste in southern Québec last month. (©Guy Fitzgérald/UQROP)

The newbie first. Fulgence is a second-year (first-winter) male snowy owl, rescued from an industrial waste pool in Saint-Fulgence, Québec, about 330 km (235 miles) northeast of Montréal along the Saguenay River on Feb. 4, 2026. Except for some minor abrasions on his wrists, all he needed was to have his legs and tail washed and decontaminated, then spend a little time and some hearty meals in the large flight aviary at the Union Quebecoise de Rehabilitation des Oiseaux de Proie (UQROP) to make sure there were no lingering problems.

Our colleague and UQROP director Dr. Guy Fitzgérald eventually pronounced Fulgence good to go, and he was released with a new CTT transmitter well away from his capture site on Feb. 21, 2026. Since then he’s been staying near Saint-Hyacinthe, not too far from his release location.

But the big news is that Otter, an adult male tagged in January 2019 in upstate New York by our longtime SNOWstorm colleague Tom McDonald – an owl that last appeared in southern Canada during the winter of 2022-23, and spent the past nearly three years in the north – is back on the grid in northern Québec. Grab a coffee, because there’s a lot to share.

Otter is the only SNOWstorm owl carrying a hybrid GSM/Argos satellite transmitter, so he’s the only one we can monitor in real time during the summer when he’s up north, since his Argos transmitter provides coverage from spring through autumn (one set of locations every Monday from March 1 through Sept. 30) when most snowies are far from a GSM cell tower. At the same time, the GPS part of the transmitter stores much more detailed location data, which we get when Otter comes back into cell range.

Otter, on the attack. (©Jean Lapointe)

If he comes back into cell range. What we hadn’t counted on was the frequency with which Otter would just stay up in the Arctic or subarctic right through the winter – one of those learning-curve lessons that are part of doing wildlife research. The winter of 2020-21, for example, he remained in the Torngat Peninsula of northern Labrador, before coming down to the Ottawa area for the winter of 2022-23, then migrating north in April 2023.

The winter of 2023-24, Otter came no farther south than the Fort Albany area on the west side of central James Bay – at least, that’s where he was in March 2024 when his Argos unit kicked in. From there, we were able to track him north to the Melville Peninsula along the Foxe Basin, north of Hudson Bay. This past summer, 2025, we were able to get weekly locations for him as he moved around Baffin Island, but there was nothing after his satellite transmitter turned off again in September. When he didn’t show up earlier in the winter, we resigned ourselves to another miss from him.

But on Sunday, Feb. 15, 2026, his GSM transmitter checked in from northern Québec, in a region I would have expected to have at best limited cell reception. The nearest town is Radisson, and that may be the key, because Radisson is near the Robert-Bourassa generating station north of the La Grande River, and likely has cell service because of its hydroelectric importance. His transmitter was apparently very low on battery voltage, and only sent about 500 backlogged GPS locations before shutting off again. Those locations just gave us a frustrating tease of his first movements north in April 2023.

Otter’s GSM transmitter is scheduled to check in on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday evenings at 7 p.m. EST, so two days later we were waiting with bated breath. Nothing that Tuesday. Nothing on Thursday. Nothing the following Sunday. Was there something wrong with his transmitter, which is (with Hochelaga’s) one of the two oldest devices still on an owl?

Then Tuesday, Feb. 24, Otter checked in again from the same location  but with a better voltage and uploaded more than 33,000 GPS locations covering all of his movements through May 2025 – not everything in his transmitter’s memory banks, we hope, but a huge portion of it. The data show that Otter has been all over the Canadian North in the past couple of years, a great example, if we still needed one, of the summer-to-summer nomadism that is a hallmark of this unusual raptor.

Otter’s April 2023 to May 2025 movements across the Canadian Arctic and subarctic. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)

When he left the Ottawa area in April 2023, Otter headed up the east side of Hudson Bay, looped all around the Ungava Peninsula and southeastern Baffin Island before crossing the Foxe Basin to the Melville Peninsula, then back to the northwestern portion of Baffin Island, where he spent the rest of the summer without nesting. We had the outlines of this trip from his weekly Argos locations, but now we have all of it in extraordinary detail, with GPS locations – coordinates, altitude and flight speed – every hour on the hour.

In September 2023 he began moving south, but never showed up in cell range, leaving us to wonder where he was during the winter of 2023-24. We can now see that he meandered his way down along the western coast of Hudson Bay through October and November 2023, not in any evident hurry, not reaching the Fort Albany area until early January 2024, and heading north again in mid-April 2024.

Owl + ice + wind + tide = a crazy pattern in the middle of Hudson Bay. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)

This time he made a long, direct flight of more than 970 km (600 miles) across Hudson Bay, making landfall just east of Rankin Inlet in Nunavut. His data suggests he made the flight with very few stops along the way, including one long, nearly 24-hour respite with the unmistakable curlicue pattern of an iceberg or ice floe moved by wind and ocean currents. Much of the time he was logging flight speeds of 44 knots (81 kph/50 mph), the sign of a strong, capable adult owl at the peak of his physical powers, and in a hurry to get back north.

Otter again spent the summer of 2024 on the Melville Peninsula, and again does not appear to have nested. This time, however, when autumn approached he turned north, and returned to Baffin Island, where he spent the winter of 2024-25. And here we come to perhaps the biggest surprise, at least to me. Otter’s transmitter, like all the CTT devices we use, is solar powered – and there is not much sunlight in the Arctic in winter. At a latitude like that of Baffin Island, the sun drops below the horizon in November and doesn’t come back up again for months. And Otter’s battery did eventually drop below an operational threshold in November and go into sleep mode, but it came back to life again in early February 2024, much sooner than I would have expected, and so we lost very little data to darkness.

When it did wake up, Otter was still in almost the same spot he’d been more than a couple of  months earlier. I have a hard time imagining what a polar winter on Baffin Island must be like – perpetual darkness, profound cold – but he made it through just fine. And the key must have been plentiful food, because Otter didn’t go prospecting for a place with enough prey to support a mate and chicks. He’d found it already.

Otter’s 2025 summer data seems to suggest that after two years of wandering, he may have found a place to nest, staying within a very small, roughly 6.8 sq. km (2.6 sq. mile) area through May 22, 2025, which is the final GPS point we have from him thus far. His last check-in was that big data dump on Feb. 24, and his silence since then, even though his battery had recharged well, suggests he’s moved away from whatever cell tower he was connecting to.

We hope that he eventually moves back into cell range, and the next check-in will provide the remaining leg of his nearly three-year journey.  Regardless, all of his spring-through-autumn data will be a huge addition to the analysis Dr. Diego Gallego García is doing of snowy owl summer movements. And all of the backlogged data we have can now be explored on his interactive map, because the seasonal Argos data we’ve had in the past didn’t display there.

Meanwhile, we’re keeping an eye on the rest of the crew. Emblème is spending a lot of time on and around the small St-Mathieu-de-Beloeil Airport barely 20 km (12 miles) from Fulgence, which though not ideal is a single-runway airstrip that caters to mostly private planes, so perhaps not the most dangerous place she could find. Hochelaga, on the other hand, has moved back to the Montréal airport, and while we know he’s an experienced adult, we always hold our breath a bit when he’s there. Atwood has hardly budged from her spot in southern Ontario near Monkton, her daily movements barely exceeding 5 sq. km (2 sq. miles).