Hochelaga’s movements since March 2024 — the summer of 2024 on the right, into the Ungava Peninsula, and in 2025 to the west of Hudson Bay to the Boothia Peninsula and King William Island. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)

Becca McCabe releases Hochelaga (marked with a bit of blue dye so he could be resighted easily) after he was trapped in 2021 at the Montréal airport. (©Rebecca McCabe)

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 with Falcon Environmental in March 2016. He was already a fully white adult then; five years later Falcon caught him again at the airport in March 2021, and this time SNOWstorm team member Rebecca McCabe fitted him with a transmitter so we could track him. “Hochelaga” refers to the name of the original Iroquoian village at what is now Montréal.

In an interesting twist, that transmitter had already been used on two other snowy owls. One was a third-year male we nicknamed Wolverine, trapped and relocated away from the Detroit Metro (DTW) airport on Dec. 31, 2019. He was a bit of a Houdini, the only owl who ever slipped out of one of our transmitter harnesses just a few days after tagging. The transmitter was quickly recovered, and a week later when Selena Creed, the biologist at DTW, recaptured another previously tagged adult female owl named Buckeye, whose original 2015 transmitter had failed, we were able to fit her with Wolverine’s.

Sadly, she didn’t wear it for long. In late March 2020 Buckeye started migrating north, and something happened to her as she moved through the forests of western Ontario. Her signal went stationary, but by that point the Covid-19 lockdowns were in effect and the Canadian-U.S. border was closed. Selena was unable to go searching for her, but a very helpful Ontario provincial conservation officer named Mitch Turcott offered to snowshoe into the remote area where Buckeye had fallen. While Mitch couldn’t by that point determine the cause of death, he was able to salvage the transmitter and ship it back to us.

That’s the one that we eventually used on Hochelaga – we have always tried to make the most out of these expensive pieces of technology.

As we note on Hochelaga’s map page, he migrated north in the spring of 2021 and spent the summer on Southampton Island in the Canadian Arctic, remaining far north until mid-December, 2021, when he flew rapidly south back to Montréal. After migrating northwest to the central Arctic on the Boothia Peninsula in spring 2022, he then remained in the north over the subsequent winter of 2022-23, never coming farther south than central James Bay.

In spring 2023 he flew east and north to Southampton Island and then backtracked to the Ungava Peninsula, where he remained until migrating rapidly south in late December 2023, arriving back in Montréal Jan. 14, 2024.

By that point, we were starting to wonder how much longer his old, 2G transmitter would continue to connect with the evolving cell network, as Canadian cell companies (like their American counterparts) phased out 2G and 3G in favor of 5G and LTE networks. At some point, we assumed, these old transmitters would no longer be able to connect with the network and send us data.

Last winter, Hochelaga did not connect, even though we were pretty sure he was back on and around the Montréal airport, based on eBird photos showing a pure white male with a transmitter hanging around his normal haunts. It seemed that his days of sending us data were past.

So imagine our surprise the evening of Sunday, Dec. 21, when a bunch of us received text alerts: “CTT Unit 88626062 [Hochelaga A5Y-M (Buckeye – 7Y Female & Wolverine TY-M)] Checkin.” The old boy was back at the airport, and his transmitter, which somehow found an appropriate cell signal, had just uploaded almost 21,000 GPS points showing (mostly) where he’s been since March 2024.

That dense cluster of points between May and August 2024 strongly suggests Hochelaga was guarding and provisioning a nest. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)

In spring 2024 he headed north along the eastern shore of James Bay, eventually settling in the northern Ungava Peninsula where, based on his very limited movements for several months, he was almost certainly guarding and provisioning a nest just east of Pingualuit National Park. Oddly, after he moved away from the presumptive nest site in September 2024, his transmitter simply stopped collecting data. That can happen if an owl stays north during the Arctic or subarctic winter, but the cutoff seemed too abrupt, and also too early in the season – there was still a good deal of daylight for solar recharge, and transmitters usually don’t go dark until late October or early November. So it seems this may have been a glitch in this well-used, well-traveled transmitter.

So it seems likely that it was Hochelaga at the airport last winter, as we suspected. For whatever reason, the unit began collecting GPS points again early April 2025, when Hochelaga was heading north up the western shore of James Bay just south of Polar Bear Provincial Park, eventually winding up back on the Boothia Peninsula and King William Island in the central Canadian Arctic, more than 1,400 km (875 miles) from where he’d been the previous summer – a typically nomadic move for this wide-wandering species. It seems he never settled down to nest this past summer, however, spending the season pretty much constantly on the move.

Hochelaga stayed north late, not really moving south in a serious way until the end of November, when he was still north of Cape Churchill on the western side of Hudson Bay. Then he shifted down to the northwest side of James Bay for two weeks until Dec. 17, finally making a quick push, including a long overwater flight across the bay, reaching the airport just about the time his transmitter connected Sunday evening.

Now, the question is whether his transmitter will continue to work and connect to the cell network. Is it balky and glitchy, and will we have a repeat of last winter’s gap? The ideal situation would be for Falcon Environment to capture him a third time and our colleague Dr. Guy Fitzgérald from Union quebecoise de rehabilitation des oiseaux de proie (UQROP) fit him with one of the brand-new LTE-compatible ES-400 transmitters we had built for us this winter, so we can continue to track this very old, very experienced owl for years to come. But because he’s very old and very experienced, fooling him a third time may prove to be a challenge – old owls follow the “fool me twice (or thrice) shame on me” principle.

Regardless, his arrival was a terrific early holiday present.