Seems the Project SNOWstorm team has hit the perfect storm of busy. All of us have been occupied due to prior obligations and haven’t been able to send any updates lately. We have managed to keep to the schedule on updating our maps. There has been some significant and interesting movement from some of the owls. Others haven’t really moved. … Read More
Class photo
As we wait for the tracked owls to start heading north, we thought we would put all of our owls into a gallery for everyone to enjoy. Below are images of all the owls tagged this winter as part of Project SNOWstorm. We wish them luck as they begin to head north for their breeding grounds, and hope to get … Read More
Goal!
Back in December, when the magnitude of the winter snowy owl irruption was becoming clear and we conceived the outlines of Project SNOWstorm, we set a pretty audacious goal — to tag more than 20 snowy owls this winter with GPS/GSM transmitters. Given that we had no funding and about a week’s planning, it may have seemed more foolhardy than … Read More
Number 20!
To all the new readers who learned about Project SNOWstorm on NPR yesterday, welcome. We’re glad to have you, even if we were a little worried that the flood of traffic after the broadcast might crash the website. We reached a milestone of a different kind Tuesday evening, when I tagged our 20th snowy owl of the winter. When the … Read More
Two New Faces
At the start of Project SNOWstorm, we set an incredibly ambitious goal — to tag at least 20 snowy owls with GPS/GSM transmitters this winter. With the addition of two more owls in the past few days, we’re almost there. On March 6, Gene Jacobs tagged an immature female near Marshfield, Wisconsin, about 40 miles northwest of our nearest snowy … Read More
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
I apologize for the lack of updates the past week. It’s been an incredibly busy one, with a few unexpected wrenches and some great news balancing out each other. This will be a long update. The biggest news is that we completed our Indiegogo campaign this week at $36,663 — 183 percent of our original goal. We’re still gobsmacked by … Read More
New supporters
We’re grateful to several new partners that have joined the SNOWstorm effort recently. The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, through its Wild Resources Conservation Program, is sponsoring a transmitter on an owl in Pennsylvania — the fourth (and likely final) unit in that state. And a collaboration between Black Swamp Bird Observatory, the Kirtland Bird Club and Toledo … Read More
An Indie-grace period
We’ve been counting down the final hours of our Indiegogo campaign, which we launched Jan. 2, and planned to close March 1. But Indiegogo (which featured Project SNOWstorm earlier this week in its newsletter) has pointed out that our 60-day campaign is actually only 58 days — and has extended our run two days, now ending on March 3. That … Read More
Millcreek
We hope you’re enjoying the latest map updates, which were posted last night. We’ll have another batch of updates on Saturday night, but I wanted to give you a sneak peek at one owl that hadn’t checked in during the last cycle: Millcreek. This immature male was banded Jan. 19 at the Erie airport, and for the first several … Read More
Snowy owl myths
This new video from the Weather Channel must set a new record for cramming the most snowy owl myths and mistakes into less than two minutes. It’s hard to know where to start, but here are two doozies. Far from mostly being skinny and starving, as the video claims, the vast majority of the owls that came south in this winter’s … Read More