This was supposed to be a long, chatty update about the status of all our tagged birds, the first in more than a week, with apologies for being behind with blog posts. Instead, we have to start with some somber news: we lost Harwood last week. He’s the Billboard Owl, the second-winter male that’s been hugging the margins of I-29 … Read More
Plainfield Joins the Flock
While Coddington continues to recuperate from is close encounter of the manure kind, we have a new owl in central Wisconsin — Plainfield, an adult female relocated from an airport for her safety, and tagged by Gene Jacobs and released on the Buena Vista grasslands, where she’s been ever since. In fact, Plainfield is occupying almost exactly the same territory … Read More
Low on Luck on Amherst
There’s been a lot going on, and the fates have not always been with us. That’s the way wildlife work goes, sometimes — you take the bad with the good. For example, one of our major goals this winter was to deploy up to five transmitters on snowy owls on Amherst Island, to continue our multi-year look at how the … Read More
A Tough (and Smelly) Break
Over the years, we’ve seen snowy owls — both our tagged birds and unmarked owls — get into a variety of problems. We’ve had tagged owls killed by collisions with vehicles and planes, electrocuted on poorly designed power lines or die from flying into them, drowned by nor’easter storms on the coast, or mangled by the powerful backwash of jet … Read More
Ice-riding Around PEI
A week or so ago we shared the news that Pickford had come zooming back into range, migrating southeast from James Bay, where she’d been since May, to northern New Brunswick. Well, she kept on moving, and her latest positions — sporadic, because her battery is still recharging from the drain it took to send almost 11,000 GPS points, and … Read More
Pickford Phones Home
Pickford — a female we tagged last winter as a first-winter immature last season on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan — has been playing hide-and-seek with us for months. The last time we heard from her in the spring was May 29, when she was heading north along the western shore of James Bay. Her transmitter connected with a cell … Read More
Introducing Coddington
We’re pleased to introduce our newest owl — “Coddington,” an adult male tagged Jan. 3, 2019, on the Buena Vista grasslands in central Wisconsin by Gene Jacobs, and named for a nearby town. Coddington weighed nearly 1,700 g (3.75 lbs.), a healthy weight for a male, which tend to weigh a third or less that of an average female snowy. … Read More