Between the holidays, travel and an impending book deadline, I’ve been a little slow with updates this season, for which I apologize. It’s worth mentioning from time to time that all of us at SNOWstorm do this on the side, so sometimes actual work gets in the way. (I hate that.) Starting in the east, Loren has continued to move … Read More
First-ever Global Status Assessment for Snowy Owls Raises Red Flags
For the first time, an assessment of the global conservation status of snowy owls has been completed, confirming that worldwide population was badly overestimated for decades, and indicating that snowy owl populations have declined by roughly a third over the past 25 to 30 years. The major study, which involved dozens of snowy owl researchers from five countries, all part … Read More
Breaking New Ground
For only the second time in Project SNOWstorm’s 11 seasons of telemetry tracking, we’ve fitted a previously injured, rehabilitated snowy owl with a transmitter to document its movements and long-term survival, a project we’ve been working toward for several years at the urging of our team of wildlife veterinarians and the rehabilitation community beyond, which wants to know how well … Read More
An Early Bloomer, and Two Nearly Neighbors
Not one but two alumni owls have come back onto the grid in the past two weeks, with a summer’s worth of wandering — and in one case, an awful lot of wandering — in the memory banks of their transmitters. On Dec. 13 we heard from Loren, who was trapped last January at the Montréal-Trudeau International Airport by the folks … Read More
Two in the North
We have our first returning owl of the 2024-25 season, and an update for you on one that — at least so far — has remained out of cell range, but not entirely off the grid. On Dec. 5 we received our first data transmission from Newton, an adult male that was tagged in January 2023 near Newton, Ontario, by … Read More
What We Raise, How it’s Spent
From the beginning, Project SNOWstorm has taken a very unusual approach to funding raptor research. When we launched SNOWstorm in December 2013, it was on a wing and a prayer, a rapid response to an unprecedented and wholly unexpected mega-irruption of snowy owls, the largest since at least the 1920s. The usual approaches to funding research — writing and submitting … Read More
The 2024 Arctic Report
Welcome to the first update of Project SNOWstorm’s 11th season of snowy owl research. Whether you’ve been with us since our first winter in 2013-14, or have just learned about our work, we welcome your interest. It’s shaping up to be an interesting winter, with the first significant, early-season push of snowy owls into the East and Midwest in several … Read More
Feeling the Heat? Plan a Winter Getaway to Support Project SNOWstorm
Yes, it’s the middle of summer, and a lot of the country is hot as a frying pan. But winter (and snowy owl season) isn’t that far away — and again this year, we’re offering a way to see some of that season’s most majestic raptors while supporting Project SNOWstorm. We’ll again be partnering with Destination: Wildlife, which specializes in … Read More
Rodenticides and Snowy Owls: A Growing Problem
The death in New York City in late February of Flaco the Eurasian eagle-owl made news all over the world; many people had been rooting for this captive-bred male, who escaped from the Central Park Zoo in a year earlier after someone vandalized his enclosure, and had been living free in the Big Apple ever since. At the time of … Read More
And Then There Were…None?
Sorry for the lapse in updates; I was traveling last week, then last Thursday and Friday we here in northern New England got walloped with up to two feet of heavy, wet snow, which brought down uncountable trees and limbs, closed many roads and left hundreds of thousands of people without power, some of whom are still waiting for restoration. … Read More