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
Who Has Been Up to What?
Between the holidays, travel and an impending book deadline, I’ve been a little slow with updates this season, for which I apologize. It’s worth mentioning from time to time that all of us at SNOWstorm do this on the side, so sometimes actual work gets in the way. (I hate that.) Starting in the east, Loren has continued to move … Read More
Two in the North
We have our first returning owl of the 2024-25 season, and an update for you on one that — at least so far — has remained out of cell range, but not entirely off the grid. On Dec. 5 we received our first data transmission from Newton, an adult male that was tagged in January 2023 near Newton, Ontario, by … Read More
And Then There Were…None?
Sorry for the lapse in updates; I was traveling last week, then last Thursday and Friday we here in northern New England got walloped with up to two feet of heavy, wet snow, which brought down uncountable trees and limbs, closed many roads and left hundreds of thousands of people without power, some of whom are still waiting for restoration. … Read More
Northward? Yes and No
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
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