Toronto takes off after her release in southern Ontario last week. (©Toronto Wildlife Centre)

I promised one more surprise, here at the very end of the season, and her name is Toronto. She’s a four-year-old female snowy owl who is back in the wild after an mishap with a high-rise building, and a helping hand from her namesake city’s largest wildlife rehabilitation group.

On March 13, 2025, the owl suffered some minor injuries when she hit a balcony window on an building and was taken to the Toronto Wildlife Centre, which since 1993 has treated more than 125,000 wild animals, roughly 5,000 a year. It was clear this owl wouldn’t require long-term care and was otherwise in good shape, so once she was ready to go they arranged with SNOWstorm bander and veterinary technician Charlotte England, who with her partner and fellow bander Malcolm Wilson lives in Toronto, to fit the owl with one of our new, lighter, 30-gram CTT transmitters designed for rehabbed owls.

Toronto is a four-year-old female, originally banded two years ago at the Detroit Metro Airport. (©Charlotte England)

Interestingly, the bird, whom we named in TWC’s honor, was already banded. She’d originally been caught at the Detroit (MI) Metro Airport in March 2022, banded and relocated. She was aged then as a second-year bird, meaning she was hatched the summer of 2021. (Because we usually don’t know exactly when a wild bird was born, for banding purposes they all have a “birthday” on Jan. 1 of each year, so by March she had gone from being a hatching-year owl to a second-year owl.) Toronto was released by TWC on March 26, 2025 in farmland north of the city. In keeping with our protocol for rehab owls, we will mask her map until she moves north, since she’s in an easily accessible area.

Incidentally, the 30-gram units, almost 15 grams lighter than the ones we’ve been using for years, have performed so well this winter that next year we’re switching over to that size for all newly tagged owls. For years, we often saw what we called the “Valley of Death” in midwinter, when low solar angle and short day length pushed the transmitters’ voltage into the red. Now that CTT is making new, more efficient solar panels in-house, that problem has disappeared, even with the slightly smaller panel size on these units. Any time we can reduce the weight of the device a bird is carrying without comprising function, that’s something we want to do, and CTT said they may eventually transition all of their ES-400 GPS-GSM transmitters to that lighter weight. We’re glad we’ve been able to help pilot that change.

Carden has been making serious tracks. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)

Otherwise, we have a couple of stay-at-homes and one more owl on the move.  Jolene and Rimouksi haven’t moved much in the past few days, though since Sunday evening Salvail has once again been at the Trudeau Airport in Montréal, which is always worrisome. The  exception was Carden, who seems to be feeling the tug of spring in the Arctic. She’s made a 355-km (221-mile) loop southwest across southern Ontario, passing within hailing distance of Jolene, then north up the shore of Lake Huron, where she spent part of the past few days riding some of the last remaining ice out on the lake before turning up the Bruce Peninsula Monday evening, a route we saw Atwood take a few weeks back.