After managing to stop each time in a place with cell service, it appears Toronto may finally have left the grid sometime after May 11. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)
Well, we may finally have reached the end of the 2024-25 snowy owl season, less than two weeks before Memorial Day in the U.S. The last two owls we were still in contact with, Toronto and Rimouski, both failed to check in last evening, May 13, suggesting they may both be outside cell range as they go north.
Toronto managed quite a feat as she migrated north the past two weeks, always winding up in an area with cell service on her Sunday/Tuesday/Thursday connection schedule as she flew 609 km (378 miles) from the outskirts of Toronto to her last port of call, near Cochrane, ON, Sunday night May 11. But last night she was a no-show, and there really isn’t much of anything in the way of cell towers between Cochrane and Moose Factory and Moosonee close to the edge of southern James Bay, where the cell network map I use shows two lonely towers. (That said, we’ve picked up owls there in the past, so maybe she’ll surprise us.)
May 10 is when Rimouski finally roused himself and started to move north, crossing the St. Lawrence from his previously undisclosed winter territory on the south shore near Notre-Dame-de-Pierreville, QC. The evening of May 11 he was near Saint-Cuthbert, QC, and here again, there is precious little in the way of a cell network to the north of there. Maybe we’ll snag one more connection from him if we’re lucky, but I’m not counting on it.
If there’s an update I’ll let you know, but assuming this is the end, let me pass on a huge and heartfelt thanks from the whole SNOWstorm team for the support and encouragement this online community provides, especially the financial backing that entirely underwrites the work we do.
This was a challenging year in many respects, especially seeing the continuing toll that highly pathogenic avian influenza is taking on snowy owls and other wild birds. Still, after several very slow winters with few owls coming south, having three returnees on the grid (plus another, Hochelaga, whose older transmitter no longer connects to the 5G grid but whose presence in Montréal was documented photographically, and Otter whose hybrid transmitter shows he stayed way north this winter) along with five newly tagged owls including Toronto and Rimouski as our first two rehabbed individuals, it felt a little more like a normal SNOWstorm winter.
Have a great summer, and we’ll see you in a few months when the days are getting shorter and the owls way up north are once more getting restless. In the meantime we’ll be busy with two big projects in development — about which we’ll have more to say when we come back into your in-box in the fall.
8 Comments on “And Then There Were … None?”
Thanks for all you do! Always fascinating. I’m interested in how the rehabbed snowies do.
I think I’m right in saying that Project SnowStorm got its start some11 or 12 winters ago when, during the infamous Polar Vortex 2013/14 winter, there was a huge irruption of Snowies. Several birds were trapped and relocated from airports in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Banding and satellite tracking soon followed aided by advances in tracker miniaturization. All-American birds in a sense.
Over the years, Project SnowStorm’s attention has increasingly turned to birds found in Quebec and Ontario. All-Canadian birds. I note that without any intentional reference to border issues, just saying…
You’re right, Peter, Project SNOWstorm got its start during the mega-irruption of 2013-14, a seat-of-the-pants, make-it-up-as-we-went effort to scramble and learn as much as we could about snowy owls. That winter there were owls as far south as Jacksonville, FL, and as far east as Bermuda, and we tagged owls as far south as Delaware and Maryland. Initially we did not have any colleagues in Canada with the proper permits, but that’s changed. What hasn’t changed is that the majority of snowy owls that come south each winter remain north of the U.S. border, with significantly fewer of them making it as far south as Pennsylvania or New Jersey — and those that do so now tend to be mobbed by birders and photographers. (We’ve seen a dramatic increase over the years in the pressure on snowy owls from usually well-meaning observers when the owls are in accessible locations.)
This past winter we had volunteer banders like Matt Solensky in North Dakota, and Nova Mackentley and Chris Neri in northern Michigan, who spent a lot of time in the field looking for snowies without success. Others, like our colleagues in upstate New York, felt the risk to human health from spending an hour or so indoors fitting a snowy with a transmitter — and not knowing if that bird had been exposed to H5N1 avian flu — was significant enough to defer tagging this past year. We’ll continue to deploy transmitters on owls on both sides of the border as the opportunity (and the schedules of our banders, who do it all on their own time) permit, and we’re proud of the fact that it’s grown into a cross-border collaboration.
Thanks for this last update Scott, so Rimouski is on his way, great! Maybe we will hear something more from the far north. Thanks to the SNOWstorm team for all your hard work, it’s so amazing to learn about the beautiful snowy owls. That irruption winter was the first time we saw a snowy owl!!
Hi thanks for all of your great work! Who could not love Snowy Owls. Just wanted to add that a Snowy Owls was seen here in Québec (near Saint Cuthbert) on May 10th, 2025. The observers said the owl looked sick and had a loss of feathers. I hope it’s not Rimouski? In any case, I hope that Snowy Owl made it back. See you next season!
Hi thanks for all of your great work! Who could not love Snowy Owls. Just wanted to add that a Snowy Owls was seen here in Québec (near Saint Cuthbert) on May 10th, 2025. The observers said the owl looked sick and had a loss of feathers. I hope it’s not Rimouski? In any case, I hope that Snowy Owl made it back. See you next season!
Snowy owl labelled threatened by expert group COSEWIC. “The Ecomuseum Zoo in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Que., sounded the alarm this week, calling on the provincial government to act swiftly.”
“Louise Blight, co-chair of COSEWIC’s bird specialist sub-committee, said the designation was based on a population decline over three generations — which corresponds to around 24 years.
“Over that period of time, the snowy owl has been seen to decline by over 40 per cent. That means it meets the criteria for threatened,” she said.
“Canadians and non-Canadians should be concerned about the status of snowy owls.” – CBC News
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/snowy-owl-threatened-quebec-1.7540040
Thanks for posting this — a number of us from Project SNOWstorm participated in the discussion in May 2024 that led to this reassessment by COSEWIC, the Canadian equivalent of the U.S. Endangered Species Act. The decision was based on a paper SNOWstorm team member Dr. Rebecca McCabe headed up last year, and the analysis for which SNOWstorm helped fund, that documented a decline in global snowy owl populations over the last three generations of owls.