Although Newton and Loren remain more or less where they’ve been (in Newton’s case, all winter), Atwood has pushed well to the north while Hochelaga has, in all likelihood, slipped off the cell network for the summer. On March 20, Atwood was just outside Kapukasing, ON, a longtime timber-and-pulp town whose paper mill’s claim to fame, since 1928, has been … Read More
Hochelaga Update
Just a quick bit of news for everyone who (like me, I must admit) might have been worried about Hochelaga, the adult male who likes to winter near the Montréal airport and who has been largely out of touch the past two weeks. Yesterday evening, March 14, he checked in — and no wonder he wasn’t connecting via cell. He’s … Read More
On the Move (or Not)
The days are getting longer, and at least one of our tagged owls has started to head north — and that one, Atwood, is a bird whose locations we’d been masking because there was a bit more photographer activity in the area than we were entirely comfortable with. We also heard from an old veteran whom we assumed had remained … Read More
All Back in Touch
Just a very quick update to say that all three of our tagged owls are where we’d expect them to be. After going dark for a week, Hochelaga’s transmitter picked up enough solar juice to reconnect regularly starting Feb. 20, and his data show he’s doing what he’s been doing all winter, hanging around the Montréal-Trudeau airport and nearby highways. … Read More
North, Then Not
As we noted last week, both of our veteran snowy owls, Newton and Hochelaga, have been off the grid for a week or two. In my most recent update, I noted that both had very low battery voltages before they went dark, so that their radio silence probably had to do with low solar recharge that’s not unusual at this … Read More
Introducing Loren
For the first time in this exceedingly slow winter, we have a newly tagged owl to introduce — Loren, an immature female in Québec. After she showed up at the Montréal-Trudeau International Airport, she was trapped Jan. 25 by biologists from Falcon Environmental, which handles wildlife control at the airport — they have been great colleagues of our in years … Read More
Two Owls, Two Personalities
So far this winter, two of our previously tagged snowy owls have come far enough south to register on the cell network and send data — Newton, an adult male tagged last winter in southern Ontario, and Hochelaga, another male that is at least 10 years old, who came down into southern Québec after remaining in the subarctic last winter. … 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
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