Atwood’s movements north starting in March 2025, and ending this week back in northeastern Ontario Tuesday evening. (North is on the right in this view) (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)

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 fitted with a transmitter in February 2024, checked in just southwest of Lake Abitibi in northeastern Ontario, near the town of Ramore. Her transmitter uploaded more than 7,300 GPS points that paint the nearly full picture of her movements since she migrated north from southwestern Ontario last March.

I say “nearly full,” because she stayed far enough north late enough into the winter that her transmitter shut itself down a few times for lack of solar recharge, though it bounced back pretty quickly once she reached more southerly latitudes. In early November she was only just below the Arctic Circle in Nunavut when her device went into hibernation, and it didn’t come back online collecting GPS points until Nov. 25, 2025, when she had moved 821 km (510 miles) south to just below Cape Churchill on the west shore of Hudson Bay.

There was another gap from Nov. 26 to Dec. 3, 2025, as she hugged the Bayshore moving south, but she wasn’t in any hurry. She lingered from Dec. 6, 2025, to Jan. 22, 2026, near the outflow of Lake River on the west side of James Bay, only then finally getting herself in gear to make a fairly quick, steady movement 685 km (425 miles) south to Ramore five days later.

As far as I can recall, this is the latest winter arrival date we’ve ever had for one of our tagged owls, though with 115-plus I need to doublecheck my memory on that; the other late-comers I recall were in early to mid-January, not the end of the month.

This obviously makes me wonder if some of the other no-shows thus far – Carden, Toronto and Rimouski among them – might also be reconsidering a northern stay.

Looking at Atwood’s data, we see that she rambled across a huge part of the central Canadian Arctic archipelago last summer, hitting several islands – Somerset, Cornwallis and Prince of Wales among them – but showing no sign that she ever settled down to nest. She also did something on her northbound migration that I recently remarked adult owls rarely do: On her flight north in the spring she made a beeline across the southern third of Hudson Bay, a decision that we think proved fatal for Salvail, the young female that appears to have been lost making the same crossing last spring.

The difference may be that Atwood did so in early May, when the bay would still have been largely frozen, as evidenced by the number of places where her data indicates she was sitting still, sometimes for several hours at a time. By the time Salvail tried to make that crossing in late May 2025 the bay was starting to open up, with fewer places to rest. I also noticed a big difference in flight speeds; when Atwood was flying she was mostly moving at 30-35 knots (55-64 kph/34-40 mph) which is pretty typical for a migrating snowy. Salvail, in the last hours before it appears she went into the water, was moving much more slowly, suggesting she was just running out of steam. Poor kid.

Elsewhere, Embleme keeps moving farther east – still on the opposite side of the St. Lawrence from the Montréal airport where she was caught, but her direction of travel is worrisome; by Jan. 28 she was on the outskirts of some of the big suburbs on the southern side of the river. Hochelaga, on the other hand, has remained in the expansive farmland south of Châteauguay since early January, and we hope he continues to hang out there, rather than the airport.