It is with both pride and pleasure that everyone here at Project SNOWstorm sends our warmest congratulations to our newly minted doctoral colleague , Dr. Rebecca McCabe. Last Friday Becca successfully defended her McGill University (Montréal) Ph.D. dissertation, a wide-ranging examination of the winter ecology of snowy owls. Becca’s work has already resulted in a number of published scientific papers … Read More
The Worst News, and Some Good News
I hate writing this kind of update; even after eight years it doesn’t get any easier to lose an owl, and I’m afraid we lost Aimé, our most recently tagged snowy, on Monday afternoon, Dec. 13. As we noted over the weekend, even though she’d been moved 80 km (50 miles) and across the wide St. Lawrence River, she quickly … Read More
Welcome, Aimé (and an Update from Fond du Lac)
Our first newly tagged snowy of the 2021-22 season has already demonstrated she’s a stubborn owl. Aimé — an adult female trapped at the Montréal-Trudeau Airport in Québec by Falcon Environmental, and tagged by Dr. Guy Fitzgérald at the University of Montréal, was relocated about 80 km (50 miles) across the St. Lawrence to farmland near the town of Saint-Aimé … Read More
Badger’s Last Flight
Last summer, I got a short, enigmatic — but very exciting — email. ” I found a white box that says to contact you if found. The number on it is 57726.” In July, Jeremy Estes and a buddy were supposed to go diving in the cold, clear waters of Lake Superior around Manitou Island, a few miles off the … Read More
Snowy Owl Science, Communicated
There’s a saying that science isn’t science until it’s communicated. We have always tried to share our findings in an easily accessible way with the general public, since that’s where 100 percent of Project SNOWstorm’s funding comes from. But it’s just as important for us to get our rigorous analyses and research into the scientific literature through conference presentations and, … Read More
We Fly Because of You
We realize that with Giving Tuesday upon us, you have many demands for your attention and your generosity. At Project SNOWstorm, we stretch every penny to the breaking point, performing ground-breaking science to understand and conserve snowy owls, funded entirely by small, tax-deductible donations from the general public. No one on the SNOWstorm team takes a salary or a stipend … Read More
Two More Returnees!
Snowy owls have been making headlines this past week, as more and more have been appearing in the upper Midwest, around the Great Lakes, throughout the St. Lawrence River valley and down the Northeast coast to Long Island. One showed up last week on the roof of a school in Goochland, Virginia, just west of Richmond, where snowies are extremely … Read More
Snowies in Spain
A tip of the hat to our International Snowy Owl Working Group colleague Roar Solheim in Norway for this story about Spain’s first (and second, and third) snowy owls ever recorded. Interestingly, during the mega-irruption in 2013-14 there were similar reports of snowy owls near major European ports like Amsterdam, and quite a few accounts of owls on cargo ships in … Read More
A New Season, and Old Friends Return
Welcome back, everyone, to the start of Project SNOWstorm’s eighth season of snowy owl tracking and research — and the timing is perfect, because in the past few days we’ve heard from three of our returning snowies, back south after a summer in the Arctic and subarctic. We also have news on what a fourth owl — Otter, who has … Read More
Meet Andrea Brown, Our Newest Collaborator
One of the best things about Project SNOWstorm has been the opportunity for us to work with up-and-coming young biologists. We’d like to introduce you all to one of those energetic collaborators: Andrea Brown, a 25-year-old from Montréal, Québec. Andrea started her undergraduate honors thesis, supervised by McGill University professor Dr. Kyle Elliott, and McGill Ph.D. candidate Rebecca McCabe (herself … Read More