The spell of mild weather that pushed through the upper Midwest and East over the weekend sparked some significant movement from our tagged owls. Erie made a 145-mile (233-km) trip up the diminishing ice on lower Lake Huron, having spent about a week at the inflow of the St. Clair River on the U.S./Canadian border. As of Monday evening he … Read More

A quick update on the latest data downloads from the past few days, mostly transmissions from April 11 and 12. Millcreek and Womelsdorf were in fairly close proximity on the fast-shrinking ice of eastern Lake Erie. This combination image of the April 12 NOAA satellite image and their movement tracks show that they’re hanging near the ice edge — good … Read More

The results are in from Plum’s necropsy (conducted, as was Sandy Neck’s, by Dr. Mark Pokras at Tufts in Boston), and they confirmed what we suspected — that she almost certainly drowned. Plum was “in great condition, [a] recently eaten rodent in the gizzard, and bloody foamy fluid in the trachea and lungs,” Dr. Pokras said. It seems all but … Read More

We already knew that the storm that swiped the New England coast March 26-28 was huge, both the winds and snow in its immediate wake, and the epic seas, storm surge and tides that slammed the coast during the days that followed. Sandy Neck got caught up in that storm and died — and now it appears that we also … Read More

It was an email we never wanted to get. Sunday night Dr. Rob Bierregaard from Drexel University and the Academy of Natural Sciences — who has been studying ospreys on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts for years — emailed us to say that one of his colleagues had found a dead snowy owl along the beach there earlier in the day, … Read More

The last few updates we’ve been focusing on the owls that are moving the most, so I thought I’d start today’s update, based on our March 27 transmissions, with the snowy that is moving the least — Oswegatchie, in upstate New York along the St. Lawrence River. Since he was tagged March 8, he has barely stirred from the town … Read More

Two updates in one day is an indication of how much is going on around here — a lot.  The first update focused on Monocacy, but there have been some fascinating movements by some of the other owls, and a reappearance by a couple of birds that had been off the grid lately. All these maps have been updated (a … Read More

As I mentioned in my last update, we’ve been trying an experiment with Monocacy, the immature female snowy owl tagged in Maryland earlier this month. On Friday, our colleagues at CTT switched her transmitter to a new duty cycle that collects a GPS location every 30 seconds, instead of every 30 minutes. Consequently, we’re collecting data at 10 times the … Read More

There’s no longer any doubt that spring is working on our cadre of tagged owls. Four of them have made dramatic northward movements — and three of them have shown the kind of striking similarity in their paths that seems unlikely to be a coincidence. Four of the five Pennsylvania owls — Erie, Amishtown, Womelsdorf and Wiconisco — have moved … Read More