As those of you who live in the northeastern U.S. or eastern Canada already know, it’s been an exceptionally cold and very snowy winter in this part of North America. Here in New Hampshire we experienced the coldest December on record, and the thermometer has only dropped since then. According to Environment Canada, while January featured a brief spell of … Read More
Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost
In 2025 Project SNOWstorm, in cooperation with Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania, contracted with Dr. Diego Gallego García of Argentina to conduct a post-doctoral analysis of an enormous set of spring and summer movement data from snowy owls in the Arctic and subarctic, working with Dr. Rebecca McCabe at Hawk Mountain. The initial analysis covered more than 40 individual owls … Read More
Look Who the Cat (or the Cold) Dragged In
I guess it’s finally gotten cold enough up north to push even an old, experienced snowy owl south. Not long after I’d lamented, in our last update, the fact that only two previously tagged owls — Hochelaga and (we presume) Newton — have come south into cell range this winter, on Tuesday, Jan. 27 Atwood, an adult female that was … Read More
Welcoming Embleme
We have a newly tagged owl on the snowy fields of southern Québec – one with a fitting name. She is Embleme, a first-winter female trapped Jan. 11, 2026, at the Montréal-Trudeau International Airport by Falcon Environment. The good folks at Falcon transported her to Dr. Guy Fitzgérald, an instructor at the University of Montréal and president of Union quebecoise … Read More
Not a Lot to Report
Apologies for the lack of an update for the past week or so. That was partly due to holiday and family travel, but also because it’s been, well, pretty slow. Thus far we have just one tagged owl that’s sending us data, Hochelaga, who has been moving back and forth across the St. Lawrence River near Montréal since he surprised … Read More
Snowy Owl Proposed for Inclusion in Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals
The snowy owl is one of 42 species that have been proposed for inclusion under the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), an international treaty under U.N. auspices. Snowies were proposed for listing under the treaty’s Appendix II, which includes species that warrant international concern. Appendix I covers species judged to be endangered. Among the … Read More
Holy Hochelaga!
The first returning tagged snowy owl of the new season has reappeared on the grid – and he’s a veteran with one of the oldest transmitters still deployed on any of our birds. It’s Hochelaga, an adult male with a penchant for the Montréal airport, where he was first trapped, banded and relocated away from the airfield by our colleagues … Read More
What We Raised, What we Spent
As we start a new winter season of snowy owl tracking, something that has only been possible over the past 14 12 seasons because of the continued support of a lot of people, I wanted to take a moment and look back at the preceding year and break down what we received in donations and what we spent on SNOWstorm’s … Read More
The Do’s — and Definite Don’t’s — of Snowy Owl Photography
Every year, it seems that birders and photographers – whether intentionally or not – put more and more pressure on snowy owls in winter. So we we’re grateful that Melissa Groo, one of the most respected conservation photographers in the world and a longtime supporter of Project SNOWstorm, offered to share her thoughts on how to photograph these majestic birds … Read More
In With a Bang
Sometimes it’s nice to be wrong. When the Project SNOWstorm team held its annual planning meeting in August, there had been no reports from the Arctic suggesting there’d been a significant snowy owl breeding event anywhere – at least, anywhere that scientists were aware of. After last year’s modestly nice irruption, we were preparing ourselves for a quiet winter without … Read More