First off, an apology — the past couple of weeks have been unusually hectic for members of the SNOWstorm team. Mike Lanzone and Trish Miller were in Israel for the Champions of the Flyway birding competition (which raised money this year for African vulture conservation). Steve Huy and his wife had a baby; I moved from Pennsylvania to New England. … Read More
On the Move
Regardless of what the weather’s been like in your neck of the woods, our tagged snowy owls know that spring is here — and this past week, a bunch of them started responding to the season. In our last post we discussed some hints of the season, including Hardscrabble’s sudden departure from his traditional winter territory in southern Ontario (and … Read More
Chasing Hardscrabble
Hardscrabble has been one of our most interesting owls, a male that was at least four years old when he was tagged on Cape Vincent, NY, in February 2016. The past three winters he has returned, quite reliably, to the Ottawa River valley near Arnprior, Ontario. But while his transmitter keeps faithfully sending us regular transmissions, a fault in its … Read More
SOARing Away from Trouble
From the beginning, one of the goals of Project SNOWstorm has been to find ways to keep snowy owls and airplanes apart, for the safety of both. We’ve worked with airport authorities and federal and state wildlife agencies, helping to trap and relocate snowy owls were possible, and tagging some of those relocated birds to better understand their movements after … Read More
A Sigh of Relief
In the last update we noted how, in the wake of ferocious winds, insanely high waves and “ice tsunamis” on Lake Ontario, we’d been worried that Otter (who had moved out onto the ice at the lake’s eastern end a week or two earlier) hadn’t checked in. Looks like our fears were unfounded, though, because this adult male moved back … Read More
Finger Lakes First
Thanks to Tom McDonald’s tenacity, we have a new snowy owl to follow — our first ever in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, and the second owl tagged with one of CTT’s new cellular/satellite hybrid transmitters. Tom’s had one of the roughest winters of his 30-plus years in snowy owl research, as we’ve detailed here in the … Read More
Farewell, Harwood
This was supposed to be a long, chatty update about the status of all our tagged birds, the first in more than a week, with apologies for being behind with blog posts. Instead, we have to start with some somber news: we lost Harwood last week. He’s the Billboard Owl, the second-winter male that’s been hugging the margins of I-29 … Read More
Plainfield Joins the Flock
While Coddington continues to recuperate from is close encounter of the manure kind, we have a new owl in central Wisconsin — Plainfield, an adult female relocated from an airport for her safety, and tagged by Gene Jacobs and released on the Buena Vista grasslands, where she’s been ever since. In fact, Plainfield is occupying almost exactly the same territory … Read More
Owl Conservation? There’s an App for That.
We’re always pleased when someone recognizes what we’ve been able to accomplish, working on a shoestring budget, for snowy owl research and conservation — which is why we’re grateful to Connectify. This Philadelphia-based company created the first software-only wifi hotspot, and since then has launched a number of other apps to smooth or speed online use. They also have a policy … Read More