After barely budging all winter, Jolene made a quick exit in early April, last checking in from the shore of Lake Huron on April 11. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)
Apologies for the long silence — I’ve been out of town the past eight days, serving as guest ornithologist at the Lodge at Little St. Simons Island in Georgia, always a delight but something that doesn’t leave a lot of time for other things.
Carden last checked in April 15 from Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)
Spring is definitely upon us, and in the past two weeks all but two of our five remaining tagged owls have skedaddled north. Jolene, who had been by far the most stay-at-home of our owls, rarely moving from a roughly 12-square-kilometer (5-square-mile) territory in southern Ontario, bolted first, moving away from her spot April 7 and to the shore of Lake Huron on April 11, after which she must have migrated rapidly north out of cell range because she hasn’t been in contact since.
Carden last checked in in April 15 from Manitoulin Island and the nearby archipelago separating North Channel from the rest of Lake Huron, where she’d been for about a week. (Fun fact: Manitoulin is, at 2,766 sq. km. [1,068 sq. miles] the world’s largest freshwater island.) As with Jolene, the sparse cell network north of there has meant we haven’t hear from Carden since she moved out.
Salvail is finally away from the dangerous environs of the Montréal airport. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)
The most recent disappearing act was Salvail, who thankfully has finally left the Montréal airport, last checking in the evening of April 18, just as she was starting to move north of the city.
The two still hanging back are both rehabbed owls: Rimouski, a juvenile male that recovered from a serious elbow dislocation and has been moving widely around southern Québec, and Toronto, an adult female who suffered some apparently mild injuries colliding with a balcony in her namesake city last month. (In both cases, we have not published their tracking maps, just to ensure humans aren’t bothering them.) I’m not entirely surprised Rimouski is still around; male snowy owls are not thought to be able to attract a mate and breed successfully until they at least several years old and have developed their pure white adult plumage.
Why owls vanish in a blink when they migrate north — there are substantial holes in the cell network once they move any distance from the shores of the Great Lakes. (https://www.ertyu.org/steven_nikkel/cancellsites.html)
Toronto, on the other hand, is four years old, and I would have expected her to be in a hurry to get back north. Instead, she moved south from her release site and has been back in the city. In fact, even before she made that move, she was gravitating to industrial sites. We’ve seen how some snowies show a preference for what to us are the least natural, most human-impacted habitats like airfields, urban centers and dockyards. We’ll be keeping
Those yellow pins waaaay up in Baffin Island are Otter, who never came south last winter and is already on the breeding grounds. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)
an eye on Toronto, and keeping in touch with the folks at the Toronto Wildlife Centre who rehabbed her, since the point of tagging rehabbed owls was to help rehabbers better understand how well their former patients reintegrate into the wild. But at this point we’re waiting to see if the increasingly springlike weather reminds her it’s time to head north.
Finally there’s Otter, carrying his old hybrid GSM-Argos satellite transmitter. He checks in once a week, and at last report he was still on Baffin Island in the Arctic, where he was when he popped back on the radar at the beginning of March, and where he may have spent the winter. As always, his online map only displays the GSM data, and thus hasn’t been updated since April 2023 when he was last in cell range.
