The North is calling: Hochelaga (purple), Emblème (green) and Fulgence (blue) on the move. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)

It seems almost everyone got the same message.

After months of barely moving, even Emblème and Fulgence, both youngsters who are usually the last to migrate north, lit out this past week. Perth had already shifted up to Georgian Bay, and by March 28, Atwood was following suit, so that by April 5 she was on what ice remained between Manitoulin Island and the mainland.

Hochelaga last checked in on April 1, 235 km (146 miles) northeast of Montréal; there’s been nothing from him since, suggesting he made a quick flight north from there into areas with little or no cell coverage. Emblème finally left the Beloeil area April 7, and by April 10 was 130 km (80 miles) northeast near Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade, QC. Fulgence departed Saint-Hyancinthe April 9, making a rapid flight north, and the next day was just south of La Mauricie National Park.

In fact, the only exception to the big skedaddle was Rudyard, who as of her last check-in on April 6 was still near her namesake town on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

With the last data in hand, here is Otter’s complete movement map from April 2023 to April 9, 2026. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)

All this sudden movement had made us even more concerned that Otter, up there in northern Québec where he’s been all winter, would decamp with the final 11 months of his data, from May 30, 2025 through now, still in his transmitter’s memory banks. But on Thursday, April 9, he checked in and sent the final 12,325 GPS points – a real squeaker. Now you can explore all of the last three full years of his movements on his map, including evidence that he did not nest last summer on Baffin Island, instead wandering quite a bit from May through September.

The big mystery is Perth. As I said, she moved out of her winter territory in southwest Ontario in late March, and was hanging around the southeasternmost edge of Georgian Bay around March 23. Then she went dark, and we assumed that she must have moved north out of cell range.

Instead, on March 25 we got a strange data transmission, just a packet of 52 GPS points ending at 04:53 UTC (08:53 EDT) that morning. They showed her flying northwest, but more disturbingly, the data showed that several of her transmitter’s onboard sensors – activity, battery voltage and solar voltage — went dark at that precise moment.

It was puzzling, and obviously worrisome. Had she had an accident? Been shot? Collided with something? Or was it just a malfunction? On April 1 – the first of the month, when all the transmitters are programmed to try to connect, even if just to say the mechanical equivalent of “I’m alive” – Perth sent 178 GPS points, which seemed to show her floating around in the bay.

Normally, I’d just assume she had found some ice, but satellite imagery seemed to show that most of that part of Georgian Bay was open water. It was beginning to look like we had an owl in the drink.

Perth (green) and Atwood (purple) both spent time on what appeared to be open water on Georgian Bay — but what happened to Perth’s transmitter, and to her, is a mystery. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)

Or did it? Not all of her sensors were offline; her altitude and speed sensors were still collecting data, and they seemed to show periodic movement. Then Atwood flew up into the same part of the bay, where she was floated around in exactly the same fashion – then flew farther north, obviously hale and hearty.

The sharp cutoff in Perth’s activity, solar medium voltage and battery medium voltage sensors (top), but the continued recording of altitude and speed data (bottom) raised a question: What happened to Perth’s transmitter? Or to Perth herself?

We now think that yes, something glitched in Perth’s transmitter, but that she and Atwood both found floating ice, likely drifting down out of the seasonal breakup from the portion of the bay north of Manitoulin Island where there was still extensive lake ice. The size of an ice floe that would serve a snowy owl nicely as a perch isn’t going to show up from space. Still, Perth has since missed several opportunities to check in, and there’s no guarantee her transmitter hasn’t had a further malfunction – or that she simply is out of cell range. We’re obviously hoping we get additional data from her in the near future to cement our assumptions one way or the other.

(Perhaps because of the glitch, Perth’s online map on our website has not automatically updated with the data through April 1 — we’re trying to troubleshoot that, too.)

We’ve long understood that spring migration, for whatever reason, is the most dangerous time of the year for our tagged owls. We’ll be keeping a close eye on them all, to the extent we can, as they head north, but for some we may have had their last data of the season. It doesn’t take much northward movement to get beyond the southern Canadian cell network.

More news as we have it.