Julie Lecours from Falcon Environment with Hochelaga in 2021. (©Julie Lecours)

One of the challenges with using technology is that it changes. Which is good — the miniaturization of batteries and other tech has allowed scientists to make ever-smaller and lighter transmitters to track ever-smaller and lighter animals.

But sometimes technology leaves you behind, and that seems to be what’s happened with one of our veteran owls, Hochelaga.

We’ve known for a while that the shift to faster and faster cell networks, like 5G and LTE, would eventually mean that our older transmitters operating on 2G or 3G networks would no longer be able to connect to GSM system and upload data. Hochelaga is an adult male that was tagged at Montréal-Trudeau Airport in 2021, but his transmitter was an older, repurposed unit first deployed on a male snowy nicknamed Wolverine at the Detroit Airport (DTW) in December 2019.

We should have named Wolverine Houdini, because he quickly slipped his harness and dropped his transmitter, which was then redeployed on a bird named Buckeye, also captured at DTW the following month, January 2020. That transmitter was the second one for Buckeye, her first having failed some years earlier. Buckeye died of unknown causes on her migration north that spring, but with help we were able to recover her transmitter.

Which is how it eventually wound up on Hochelaga, originally banded at the Montréal airport in 2016 and retrapped there on March 2, 2021, tagged with Wolverine/Buckeye’s transmitter and relocated for his safety. Every winter since then he’s shown great fidelity to the area, not necessarily spending a lot of time on the airfield itself, but mostly hunting along the urban highways nearby. He was back last winter before heading north, last checking in March 17, 2024, when he was halfway up the eastern side of James Bay, near a Cree community with cell service. (Many of the bush communities still have older, slower cell coverage.)

We’d been waiting to see if he would check in this winter, but have heard nothing — until SNOWstorm team member Becca McCabe noticed photos on eBird from earlier this month of what we’re reasonably sure is Hochelaga, back at the Montréal airport. Either something is wrong with his transmitter or (far more likely) the last low-G cell receivers in the area have been taken out of service since last winter.

SNOWstorm team member Becca McCabe releases Hochelaga in 2021. The small areas of blue dye would alert airport authorities that this owl had already been trapped. (Rebecca McCabe)

Obviously, we’d love to have the chance to fit Hochelaga with a new transmitter and recover his current unit, which should have all of his GPS data since last March (the issue with GSM cell service doesn’t effect the transmitter’s ability to collect and store location data, just send it). Falcon Environment, the folks who do raptor trapping and relocation at the airport and caught him both times in the past, will keep an eye out for him and catch him if they can — and if they’re successful, our colleague Dr. Guy Fitzgerald can get him suited up with a new transmitter. But Hochelaga has already been trapped two times, so there’s definitely an element of, “Fool me twice, shame on me” at play. Nor has he in the past spent all that much time at the airport. All we can do is keep our fingers crossed.

We also suspect the same thing may have happened with our old friend Otter, tagged in New York in January 2019. With Otter we should continue to get at least a seasonal look at his location, since he carries the only hybrid GSM/Argos satellite transmitter of any of our tagged owls. The satellite side doesn’t need the cell network, but it’s only programmed to transmit from March 1 to Sept. 30 when he’s up north out of cell range. That said, if come the first of March we find that he’s somewhere far enough south to attempt to trap (as opposed to last winter, when he stayed up near the mouth of James Bay) we might consider mounting a last-ditch attempt to trap him and do a transmitter swap, too.

As you can imagine, this is frustrating for us, but none of us back in 2013, when we started SNOWstorm, expected that the telecommunications industry would change as fast and as frequently as it has. We’re told that the newer cell networks should be stable for quite a while, but the only guarantee is that change is always coming.