Chloe Pereira, a veterinary student from France, releases Salvail, a first-winter female snowy owl that was originally trapped Feb. 5, 2025, at the Trudeau-Montréal Airport. (©Guy Fitzgerald)
What will likely be the last new SNOWstorm owl of the winter season is watching the world go by from an airport — though fortunately not the biggest, busiest airport she could have chosen.
Salvail, as we’ve nicknamed her, is a first-winter female snowy that was trapped at the Trudeau-Montréal airport on Feb. 5, 2025, by our colleagues from Falcon Environmental, who routinely catch and relocate raptors from the airfield. The bird was taken to longtime SNOWstorm collaborator Dr. Guy Fitzgérald at the Union québécoise de réhabilitation des oiseaux de proie (UQROP) for a checkup. Guy found her to be a bit on the thin side, so decided to hold her for a while to fatten her up to a plump 2,100 grams (4.6 pounds) before banding and fitting her with a CTT transmitter, then releasing her Feb. 26, 2025, near the Salvail River on the southern shore of the St. Lawrence in Québec — hence her nickname.
Salvail needed some time at UQROP to regain weight before her release Feb. 26, 2025. (©Guy Fitzgerald)
Salvail moved pretty quickly out of that lovely, rural farm country, heading east and south toward the city again. She passed through Loren’s old stomping ground (more on Loren and the other tagged owls in a moment), crossing the river to the island of Montréal, then back south to wind up at the Saint-Hubert Airport, where she has remained. This obviously isn’t ideal, but at least this is a much smaller, less busy airport then Trudeau-Montréal 27 km (17 miles) to the west. Her map is up, though it does show one aberrant GPS point that makes it appear she flew 73 km (46 miles) to the southwest and back in an hour. That was a transmitter hiccup; she is not a supersonic owl.
Otherwise, most of our tagged owls are pretty much where we left them last time, which is fairly typical of this point in the winter; they’ve either returned to their habitual wintering site, which is behavior we often see with adults like Atwood and Newton, or they’ve hit on a spot they like with plenty of food and don’t need to wander, which appears to be the case with first-winter birds like Carden and Jolene, none of whom have budged in the past month in southern Ontario.
Newton (purple), Jolene (blue) and Atwood (green) haven’t moved much from their winter-long activity areas. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)
The one exception has been Loren, over in southern Québec. In early February she was using a fairly small area of on the southern edge of the St. Lawrence opposite Repentigny, sometimes moving out onto the frozen river. But by Feb. 20 she got the wandering bug, and made a 165-km (142-mile) loop to the east before stopping March 1 near St-Guillaume, QC. Why? It may be a little pre-migration restlessness as the days lengthen and the sun climbs higher, or just an itch she needed to scratch.
Loren (purple) is the only tagged owl to have made a significant move in recent weeks, a big loop east and partway back. Salvail, on the other hand, moved west and south to the St-Hubert airport. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)
The remaining tagged owl, Rimouski, is our former rehab patient whose location we have not been making public this winter. He’s been using a roughly 150-square-km (58-square-mile) section of his undisclosed location in southern Québec, which is a good indication that the wing injury Guy Fitzgérald treated him for earlier this winter is fully healed.
7 Comments on “One More on the Roster: Salvail”
I have a few questions. On the second map where Loren and Salvail seem to intersect on the left side, is that near the airport? I was trying to see where SH Airport is on the map myself but can’t seem to locate it without help. Also, based on the map terrain and not knowing the area at all, is it highly populated or mostly rural? Lastly, do the owls tend to fly (long distances) to new locations at night? Thanks in advance!
No, the St-Hubert airport is hard to see under the cluster of Salvail’s points, due south of that track intersection you mentioned. It’s not a big airport and it is mostly hidden by the cluster of blue location icons, which also partially conceal the snowy owl icon with Salvail’s name and the date of last known location (3/6/25). I realize it’s hard to interpret the map with all the blue squares and arrows jumbled together but that’s unavoidable in Google Earth at this scale when the owl is using a small area. The St.-Hubert airport is right at the edge of the southern extent of the Montréal urban area and the more open rural land beyond, which I saw firsthand earlier this week when my wife and I drove through there just a few kilometers away, coming back from a non-owl-related trip to southern Québec. That’s also where the really awful Montréal traffic finally eased up…
Is there any chance that Loren could be wandering searching for a mate? Or do all Snowies pair up later, when they have returned north to their breeding grounds?
Definitely not romance-roaming; as you suggest, they don’t pair up until they are up on the breeding grounds in the Arctic or subarctic. And because they are so wildly nomadic from summer to summer, they’re almost certainly never with the same mate from one year to the next, though I’m not sure how much direct evidence we have for that one way or the other. Just seems unlikely that one season’s pair would find each other again, since going back to where they nested the year before would be a recipe for failure, because the mammal peak would have passed and food would be scarce. That’s why some of our owls shift thousands of kilometers from one summer to the next, looking for where the lemmings or voles are reaching a local population peak.
The transmitter in Salvail’s photo looks large but that may be the angle of the photo. What is the size and weight of the transmitters and where are they placed on the owls? How long do they stay on? (Sorry – I know this has been discussed here before but I have forgotten!) Thanks for your work with the Snowy Owls and for sharing these fascinating updates!
We have two transmitter sizes that we use. The standard weighs about 45g (1.6 ounces), which is the version Salvail received; she’s a female and thus larger than a male snowy, and as noted weighed 2,100g at release. The generally accepted safe threshold for adding what are known as auxiliary markers (color bands, transmitters, neck collars on geese, etc.) is 3 percent or less of the bird’s body mass. In Salvail’s case, the 45g transmitter is well below that, even with about 5g of woven synthetic Spectra material that forms the backpack harness that holds the transmitter in the middle of the back, and the aluminum leg band. We also have started using a lighter 30g transmitter with a couple fewer bells and whistles, which we had custom-made by CTT for both smaller male owls, and owls like Rimouski that have been rehabbed for an injury. But even though these units are lighter, they employ the same size case, which is the size and shape it is in order to keep the solar panel above the back feathers, a real challenge with snowy owls because they have such thick plumage. The transmitters stay on for life, so we are exceedingly careful in how we fit them; I’ve gotten almost to the end of the process, not been entirely happy with the fit, and started again. And there have been times in the past, with owls like Baltimore whose transmitters failed but we were able to relocate the owl, where we’ve made repeated efforts to retrap the bird and remove the nonfunctioning unit.
Whew! Long answer.
Thanks for the updates and welcome to the SNOWstorm family Salvail !!! Is very good to hear Rimouski seems to be doing fine after being rehabbed for his injury. We haven’t seen many snowies on our neck of the woods this winter.