Snowy owls…they’ll break your heart, and take your breath away, sometimes all at once. Here’s the story of my attempts to tag a new owl near Erie, Pa. — and also the latest on Erie the owl, one we’ve been tracking since last winter. Sunday and Monday I was in Erie, trying to catch a snowy owl in Presque Isle State … Read More

One of the most common questions we’ve been getting lately is, How does this winter’s irruption compare with last year’s, or with previous winters? Fortunately, our colleague Andrew Farnsworth at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology tackled just this question over at BirdCast, the CLO project that forecasts bird migration using radar and other information. Andrew and Benjamin Van Doren have used … Read More

 (Dr. Cindy Driscoll is the state fish and wildlife veterinarian for Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources [DNR], and has served as the veterinary coordinator for Project SNOWstorm since our start last winter. Read how Cindy got involved through SNOWstorm cofounder Dave Brinker — and click here for a longer story and photos from the University of Pennsylvania about how Project … Read More

Let me start with an apology, for the gap in updates — I was out of the country last week, and the rest of the SNOWstorm team was scattered to the four winds as well. Which is a shame, because our second owl from last winter has popped up in cell range — Century, banded in Massachusetts in March by … Read More

Last week, my phone suddenly went nuts — Mike Lanzone and Andy McGann at CTT, who make the transmitters we use, and Dave Brinker in Maryland, were all trying to call at the same time, with the same fantastic news. Millcreek was back! This immature male snowy owl, which Mike and bander Tom McDonald had tagged last Jan. 20 in … Read More

By Jean-François Therrien Every year since the late 1980s, a group of researchers of which I feel lucky to call myself part has headed north to the high Arctic — as do snowy owls — to monitor their summer breeding areas. Our long-term study site is on Bylot Island in Nunavut, Canada, at 73 degrees north, above Baffin Island. It … Read More

Welcome to the first blog update of the 2014-15 winter season from Project SNOWstorm. Whether you’ve been following our progress from the very start, or just joined the excitement, we’re glad you’re here. Project SNOWstorm is a collaborative effort, involving dozens of researchers, banders, wildlife veterinarians and pathologists who are studying the movements of snowy owls. The project started last … Read More

The last time we heard from Oswegatchie — the only snowy owl from our 2013-14 cadre that was still in cell range — was June 16, when he was hanging around the huge Mine Canadian open-pit gold mine at Malartic, in western Quebec, where he’d been since the beginning of the month. After he missed the next few check-in nights, … Read More