Toronto has at last heard the call of the north. Rimouski, not so much.(©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)

Here in northern New England, spring has arrived in a rush, with new leaves on the hardwoods and a rush of lately returned migrant songbirds — red-eyed vireos, great crested flycatchers and rose-breasted grosbeaks just this morning in the woods around our home in New Hampshire.

And yet, there are still a few stubborn winter holdouts in the form of snowy owls that haven’t taken the seasonal hint, including one of our tagged owls.

Just one, fortunately, because Toronto has finally started pushing north in the past week and a half from her namesake city in southern Ontario. As of the evening of May 6 she had flown 375 km (233 miles) more or less due north, and was north of Wanapitei Lake above Sudbury, ON. There’s an awfully big gap in the cell network beyond her last location, until one gets all the way up to Timmins, ON, another 161 km (100 miles) farther north, so unless we get really lucky this may be the last we hear from her this season.

That leaves Rimouski, our other rehabbed owl over in southern Québec. We’ve not been publishing a tracking map for him, but he’s been seen and photographed, along with a second untagged snowy with which he occasionally roosts, quite a bit since the end of April. Those two are among the dozen or so snowy owls that were still being reported on eBird at the beginning of May, from Minnesota in the west to New Brunswick and Québec in the east. It’s not always possible to tell from eBird photos, but in those where age is apparent (photographed in flight so that flight feather molt or the lack thereof is visible) most of them are youngsters, which is to be expected.

Given that Rimouski was rehabbed for a dislocated elbow, we obviously have to ask ourselves if his failure to launch is connected to his old injury. It may well be, just as Toronto’s late departure may have been linked to what were assumed to be relatively minor injuries from colliding with a building balcony. Finding out how well, or poorly, rehabbed snowy owls fare post-release is the reason we launched this aspect of our study, since rehabilitators generally have no way of knowing how their former patients do once they’re back in the wild. We’re keeping in touch with Dr. Guy Fitzgérald, who treated Rimouski, but for the time being we continue to take a wait-and-see approach. We’ve had young snowies stay in the south well into May in years past, but it’s definitely unusual.