Catching Up

Scott WeidensaulUpdates

Sorry for the silence the past two weeks — as we’ve said before, all of us at Project SNOWstorm do this in our spare time, and this is a busy season for wildlife folks. I just got back from a 10-day writing and research trip to China focusing on shorebirds, while webmaster Drew Weber was with the Cornell Lab’s Sapsuckers … Read More

Stampede

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The movement north is in full swing, and by last week we only had a handful of owls still on their winter territories. Everyone else was on the move, or (maybe) already out of cell range. The movements have been especially strong in the East, where spring has finally started to make itself felt — but migration timing is only … Read More

Stops and Starts

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The past week was a wild one for weather across much of the terrain our tagged owls are inhabiting. Some places went from summerlike tee-shirt weather one day to whiteout snow squalls the next, while blizzards and ice storms raked still other regions. So it’s not surprising that some owls that had been moving north hung back –but others pushed … Read More

More Heading North

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Last week, we saw the first signs of northbound migration, but over the weekend we had several owls making major movements north in New England, Quebec and the Midwest. Arlington, who began moving a couple weeks ago, actually stopped and reversed course a bit in recent days in Pine County, Minnesota, not far from the “snout” of Lake Superior, and … Read More

Let the Race Begin

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Arlington isn’t waiting for spring. This juvenile male is making serious tracks to the north — the first of this winter’s class of tagged owls to show more than just some late-winter wanderlust. In just the past week he’s moved more than 120 miles (200 km) from south of Eu Claire, Wisconsin, northwest into Kanabec County, Minnesota — and more … Read More

Shaking Things Up

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The days are getting longer, and right on schedule, we’re seeing some restlessness start to appear among this winter’s cohort of owls. But there’s a lot of ground to cover this week, including the second “bomb cyclone” of the winter on the Northeast coast, an ice-queen owl on the Great Lakes, and a turbine-dodging bird on the prairies. Here are … Read More

Weekly Update

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It’s been quite a week, with new owls in five states — but there’s lots happening with the rest of this winter’s cadre, too. Here’s a roundup of where we stand with all 24 of the snowy owls we’re currently tracking. It’s a lot of ground — geographically and metaphorically — to cover. The most intriguing movements this week were … Read More

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

Back to Amherst

Scott WeidensaulUpdates5 Comments

Things are really happening in a whirlwind here these days, and we have a lot of news to share. Today, it’s two newly tagged owls on Amherst Island, one of the most famous owl spots in North America. (I also made an attempt to tag an owl in northeast Ohio, but came up short — that’s a story for another … Read More