Who is Where?

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Time for a weekend update on our 2017-18 cohort — the largest we’ve had since our first winter four years ago. We’ll start west and work our way east, but it’s a lot of owls. Ashtabula remains pretty faithful to his general territory near Sanborn, ND, and lately has been spending a lot of time roosting in a grove of … Read More

Neighbors

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One of the goals we set for ourselves this winter is to track the movements and interactions of neighboring owls, as we did several years ago with Whitefish Point and Chippewa in northern Michigan. So this winter we’ve made an effort to trap and tag snowies in close proximity to one another, starting with Island Beach and Lenape on the … Read More

Bancroft and Austin (and Badger and Arlington and…)

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As we mentioned, last week was a busy one at Project SNOWstorm. As we were adding two newly tagged owls on Amherst Island in Ontario, we also had two new birds sporting transmitters in Wisconsin, where we’re partnering with a number of organizations to track owls this winter. The newest recruits are: —Bancroft, a juvenile male caught Jan. 16 on … Read More

Welcoming (Back) Ashtabula

Scott WeidensaulUpdates6 Comments

In the wake of Higbee‘s loss, we have some exciting news in this update — great data from our new owls in Wisconsin, evidence that Chickatawbut probably nested last summer in the subarctic, and the unexpected return of Ashtabula. Wait — Ashta-who? If you’re scratching your head and wondering why you can’t recall that particular owl, don’t worry. This is … Read More

Losing Higbee

Scott WeidensaulUpdates8 Comments

For the second time this winter, we’ve lost a tagged owl — Higbee, one of the three juvenile males we’ve come to think of as the “Jersey Boys.” And while the immediate cause was a vehicle collision, it occurred during an historically big coastal storm that we initially believed all three owls had survived. We became aware that something was … Read More

Badger and Arlington Take the Stage

Scott WeidensaulUpdates2 Comments

We have two new owls to introduce — and a heck of story about how they were tagged, despite some of the worst weather this winter. They are Badger and Arlington, and both are in Wisconsin. That represents a return to SNOWstorm’s roots, in a way, because the second owl we ever tagged in 2013, Buena Vista, was caught in … Read More