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 Emblème
We have a newly tagged owl on the snowy fields of southern Québec – one with a fitting name. She is Emblème, 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
And Then There Were … None?
Well, we may finally have reached the end of the 2024-25 snowy owl season, less than two weeks before Memorial Day in the U.S. The last two owls we were still in contact with, Toronto and Rimouski, both failed to check in last evening, May 13, suggesting they may both be outside cell range as they go north. Toronto managed … Read More
One Goes, One Stays
Here in northern New England, spring has arrived in a rush, with new leaves on the hardwoods and a rush of lately returned migrant songbirds — red-eyed vireos, great crested flycatchers and rose-breasted grosbeaks just this morning in the woods around our home in New Hampshire. And yet, there are still a few stubborn winter holdouts in the form of … Read More