Perseverance pays off, and the sterling example this winter has been our Ontario colleagues, Charlotte England and Malcolm Wilson, who have spent weeks trekking all around the southwest of the province trying to trap adult snowy owls to deploy transmitters. It’s not that they couldn’t find owls; the trouble was those adults all gave the clear impression of having seen … Read More
Not a Lot to Report
Apologies for the lack of an update for the past week or so. That was partly due to holiday and family travel, but also because it’s been, well, pretty slow. Thus far we have just one tagged owl that’s sending us data, Hochelaga, who has been moving back and forth across the St. Lawrence River near Montréal since he surprised … Read More
In With a Bang
Sometimes it’s nice to be wrong. When the Project SNOWstorm team held its annual planning meeting in August, there had been no reports from the Arctic suggesting there’d been a significant snowy owl breeding event anywhere – at least, anywhere that scientists were aware of. After last year’s modestly nice irruption, we were preparing ourselves for a quiet winter without … Read More
And Then There Were Two
Apologies for the long silence — I’ve been out of town the past eight days, serving as guest ornithologist at the Lodge at Little St. Simons Island in Georgia, always a delight but something that doesn’t leave a lot of time for other things. Spring is definitely upon us, and in the past two weeks all but two of our … Read More
One More on the Team
I promised one more surprise, here at the very end of the season, and her name is Toronto. She’s a four-year-old female snowy owl who is back in the wild after an mishap with a high-rise building, and a helping hand from her namesake city’s largest wildlife rehabilitation group. On March 13, 2025, the owl suffered some minor injuries when … Read More
Scattering With the Season
And just like that, spring has sprung. Last week’s milder weather seems to have triggered a bit of a mass exodus. After showing very little of the pre-migratory restlessness we sometimes see in late winter, and for the most part remaining hunkered down on their winter territories, in the past 10 days we’ve seen the first big movements to the … Read More
One More on the Roster: Salvail
What will likely be the last new SNOWstorm owl of the winter season is watching the world go by from an airport — though fortunately not the biggest, busiest airport she could have chosen. Salvail, as we’ve nicknamed her, is a first-winter female snowy that was trapped at the Trudeau-Montréal airport on Feb. 5, 2025, by our colleagues from Falcon … Read More