All of a sudden, there are a lot of snowy owls in dozens of locations from BC and Washington state to the Atlantic seaboard. (eBird/Cornell Lab of Ornithology)

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 too much activity.

But the Arctic is a huge place, and while there are many Indigenous communities across Canada and Alaska who are keenly aware of what’s happening on their ancestral lands, they have better things to do than alert a bunch of non-Indigenous scientists down south that, hey, a lot of snowy owls were having babies here this summer.

But it obviously happened somewhere up North, because in late October – unusually early – snowy owls started showing up in rapidly increasing numbers, from the western prairies to the Maritimes in Canada, and especially in the western Great Lakes around southern Ontario, Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin.

That surge has only intensified in the past couple of weeks, with more and more owls showing up daily on eBird (which doesn’t necessarily reflect the full sweep of where owls are), filling in the landscape in such normal hotspots as the Ottawa and St. Lawrence river valleys, southern Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, and even a few in British Columbia and Washington state, where snowies have been scarce to absent in recent years. They’ve appeared as far south as Long Island, New York, eastern Iowa and northwestern Ohio.

Ageing and sexing snowy owls is trickier than a lot of birders realize, and especially so with perched birds, but looking at photos on eBird, it does seem as though the majority are likely young of the year – and with those photos that show birds in flight or with the upper surface of the spread wings visible, so it’s possible to assess molt and secondary flight feather pattern (diagnostic in young birds for age and sex), pretty much all those I’ve looked at have been hatching-year owls on their first migration.

Which is what we expect from a heavy irruption year – big flights are almost always the result of good reproduction the previous summer, and a pulse of young owls making their initial migration. That old business about “starving owls forced south by hunger” is a myth. Our research has shown time and again most of these birds are in pretty good shape, though being juveniles, not all of them will thrive, and there are plenty of ways they can get into trouble with humans.

Unfortunately, we’re also already getting reports of photographers who are using live rodents to bait these owls for video and photographs. As we have stressed so many times in the past, this practice puts these owls at serious risk, because they very quickly learn to associate humans with food, which means they are even more likely to wind up in situations, like flying toward humans or vehicles, that may not end well for them. If you are a photographer or a birder, please respect the wildness of the owl and keep your distance, and never offer bait. Nor should you patronize the unethical photo tour operators who use bait to provide “action shots” for their clients.

Our tagging teams will again be deploying transmitters on snowy owls this winter, and they’re scrambling a bit to get ready for the field earlier than they expected. We’re pleased to announce that we have a new team we’ll be collaborating with in Minnesota, Frank Nicoletti and the research crew at Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory in Duluth, who have been doing work with owls and diurnal raptors for years, including telemetry. We haven’t had a tagged owl in Minnesota since our very first winter (a bird called Ramsey, who also had issues with photographers baiting with live mice), and we’re anxious to see what some Lake Superior owls do this winter.

Thus far, none of our previously tagged owls have come south into cell range, but we’ll be keeping a very close eye on that. Generally speaking, the first ones south each winter tend to be juveniles, while the older owls linger north later.

Jolene’s last flight, up the shore of Lake Huron to the base of the Bruce Peninsula. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)

Sadly, one owl who won’t be coming back is Jolene, who was tagged in southern Ontario last winter and started north in early April. After her last transmission April 10 we assumed she had moved north of the cell network and would be off the grid until next winter, but then in late May we got a single ping, one lone GPS point, from a large wildlife management area on the Bruce Peninsula – but no other data. The transmitter was showing very low voltage, so we assumed something happened, either a lost transmitter or a lost owl.

Over the summer, every once in a while we would get a repeat of that one, single GPS point. Charlotte England and Malcolm Wilson, the Ontario banders who tagged Jolene, reached out to folks at the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, and two biologists volunteered to look for her, but we knew that the single set of coordinates might not be especially accurate, and they came up dry despite a good effort.

The mapped cluster of Jolene’s GPS points. (©Project SNOWstorm and CTT)

That’s where things remained until the beginning of November, where Jolene’s transmitter finally got enough sun (ironically, probably because the leaves dropped, allowing the low, late autumn sun to reach the ground). Suddenly, the unit sent more than 400 GPS points, showing that around daybreak April 12 she was moving up the Bruce Peninsula, flying at about 22 knots (40 kph/25 mph), a normal flight speed for a snowy owl not in a hurry. And then, she stopped moving. The rest of the points were all clustered in that same area of dense woodland that had been searched earlier in the year. Each of those points varied a little bit from each other, but if we averaged the 150 or so highest-quality locations, in theory that should more or less pinpoint where the transmitter lay.

Charlotte and Malcolm loaded that averaged set of coordinates in a hand-held GPS and made the long drive from Toronto to the middle of the Bruce Peninsula. They crashed through some incredibly dense conifer forest to the spot – a needle in a haystack, they said, but it worked. Charlotte quickly found the transmitter and what remained of Jolene, mostly her larger bones, some of which appeared to have been broken apart by scavengers. Here’s what the location looked like (video ©Malcolm Wilson):

At this stage there was obviously no way of knowing what happened to her – a predator, sickness from avian influenza, maybe an accident. There was no evident sign of foul play, like buckshot holes in the transmitter or her breastbone, though we can’t really be sure. We’ve known for a while that spring migration is an unusually dangerous time for snowy owls, especially juveniles like Jolene trying to cross the boreal forest, which is an inhospitable habitat for an open-country bird. But her legacy, and her transmitter, live on, and once we confirm that the unit is working properly we should be able to redeploy it on another owl this winter.

Baffin Island, where Otter spent last winter and all of this past summer. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)

Finally, the only owl we’re able to keep a distant eye on during the summer is Otter, whose 2019 hybrid 3G transmitter, though no longer able to communicate with newer 5G/LTE cell networks, does send weekly GPS fixes through the Argos satellite system from March through September. Otter had apparently wintered on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, and he remained on Baffin through Sept. 7, which was the last fix we got for him. Judging from the way he was moving

A closer view of Otter’s movements from March through September in southern Baffin Island. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)

around, we suspect he was not guarding and provisioning a nest this summer, so it seems none of the snowies now coming south are Otter Juniors. (Because his data no longer comes through the GSM cell system, Otter’s Argos-transmitted locations don’t appear on his interactive map — sorry. This static map will have to do — though if he does come south and we can retreat him and swap transmitters, his current one should have several years’ worth of stored data we could download. )

As always, we appreciate the support the SNOWstorm community has given us since we launched this project in December 2013. Your tax-deductible (for U.S. citizens) donations remain the only funding we receive, and we stretch every penny to the max – or maybe every nickel, now that the U.S. Mint has stopped producing new pennies. I’ll be back soon with a complete financial report on what we raised and what we spent in the past year, because we want everyone to see where their donations go.