Happy 2023, a bit belatedly — I hope the new year is off to a peaceful start for everyone. Columbia certainly seems to have found her spot, and every check-in shows her using a fairly small 11 sq. km (4.25 sq. mile) area of farmland southeast of Carman, MB. That’s where Ken Stewart, an amateur wildlife photographer, encountered Columbia on … Read More
A Year-end Update, and an Out-of-Place Owl
Here’s hoping everyone is enjoying the final days of 2022. It certainly seems as though Columbia has found her spot for the winter, just southeast of Carman, Manitoba, where she’s been hanging out since the beginning of December. It’s always possible deeper snow cover may eventually force her farther south where hunting may be easier, but for now she seems … Read More
Otter’s Back on the Grid
Well, just a day after our last update on Dec. 14 lamenting how quietly the season was starting, we got the great news that Otter — our 2019-tagged adult male fitted with a hybrid satellite-GSM transmitter so we can track him in the off-season — was back on the cellular grid in southern Ontario. With his arrival we got an … Read More
Pretty Quiet Out There
Well, we predicted this would be an off-season for snowy owls in many parts of North America, and so far that seems to be the case. And it’s been an unusually slow start for us in terms of returning tagged owls. Columbia, who popped back on the grid in late November in southern Manitoba, has moved 240 km (about 150 … Read More
The First News From the North
Welcome back, everyone, to another season — our 10th — of snowy owl research here at Project SNOWstorm! We’re anticipating an interesting year, with some big developments both in the field and off that we’ll be sharing in the weeks ahead. But first, we have two treats. One is news of the first returning owl of the season — Columbia, … Read More
The Pull of the North
Breaking, and very unwelcome news: As I was preparing to post this update, we learned that Roc, the adult female tagged by Tom McDonald’s team at the Douglass-Greater Rochester (NY) airport earlier this winter, was found dead along on off-ramp from I-390 close to the airport, the apparent victim of a vehicle collision. We’re grateful to the Monroe County Sheriff’s … Read More
On the Move (Direction, um…Uncertain)
The past couple of weeks have seen some pulses of late-winter warmth into the Northeast, and along with longer days, it’s definitely having an effect on some of our owls. This is the time of year when we expect breeding-age adults especially to get antsy, and several of them have indeed begun moving in a noticeable way — though in … Read More
One, Two, Three New Owls
This winter has been dominated mostly by news of our many returning snowies, with only three newly tagged owls, all relocated from the Montréal airport — Aimé, who immediately returned to the airfield and was killed by the back-blast of a taxiing jet, and Nicolet and Odanak, both of whom also returned to the airport but have thus far mostly … Read More
Here, or There?
To stay, or go: That is the question. Stella, one of our transmittered alumni, was originally tagged four years ago, in January 2018 on Amherst Island on the northeastern edge of Lake Ontario. She was a juvenile then, having hatched the previous summer. When she migrated north that spring, she swung wide to the west, up the western shore of … Read More