The last gift of Yuletide came a little late this year for Project SNOWstorm. On Sunday evening, Jan. 9, we were surprised and delighted to see that Yul — an adult female originally captured at the Montréal airport in November 2019, and named for that airport’s international code, YUL — had just made a late return from the North. What’s … Read More
Hochelaga and Otter Return
It’s always exciting when a previously tagged owl returns south, carrying with it months’ — or even years’ — worth of backlogged data. We got two such returns in the past week or so, including a snowy owl we’ve been especially hoping to hear from. Hochelaga: The day after Christmas we were pleased to see Hochelaga check in for the … Read More
The Worst News, and Some Good News
I hate writing this kind of update; even after eight years it doesn’t get any easier to lose an owl, and I’m afraid we lost Aimé, our most recently tagged snowy, on Monday afternoon, Dec. 13. As we noted over the weekend, even though she’d been moved 80 km (50 miles) and across the wide St. Lawrence River, she quickly … Read More
A New Season, and Old Friends Return
Welcome back, everyone, to the start of Project SNOWstorm’s eighth season of snowy owl tracking and research — and the timing is perfect, because in the past few days we’ve heard from three of our returning snowies, back south after a summer in the Arctic and subarctic. We also have news on what a fourth owl — Otter, who has … Read More
Alderbrooke
We’re pleased to announce the first newly tagged owl of the season — a heavily marked juvenile female we’ve nicknamed Alderbrooke, trapped and relocated from the Montréal airport. Trapped and relocated twice, in fact; much as with Dorval last year, Alderbrooke as proven to be a persistent boomerang. She was initially trapped Dec. 9 by Julie Lecours of Falcon Environmental, … Read More
The Last Three
It’s spring — although here in New England, where I live, and in other parts of the East, you’d have been hard-pressed to know recently, with accumulating snow last weekend as far south as the mid-Atlantic region. Still, our tagged snowy owls realize the seasons are moving fast, and they have been as well. In the past couple of weeks, … Read More
Attaboy, Otter!
This time of year, we can see some really dramatic changes — and that certainly has happened within the past week or so. We’ve gone from 15 owls in regular contact to just six, as most of the rest have apparently migrated out of cell range. Perhaps not surprisingly, two of the owls that wintered farthest north — Pettibone in … Read More
Losing Buckeye
We’ve seen some major migration to the north this past week, including one owl that is most of the way to James Bay — but the biggest news is the saddest, because we’ve lost one of our oldest and most interesting owls. You’ll recall my relief last week that, having survived a winter at Detroit Metro Airport (DTW), Buckeye was … Read More
The Pull of Spring
These have been strange and disquieting days for everyone, no less so for those of us with Project SNOWstorm. The global coronavirus pandemic has upended — well, pretty much everything. But even in hard times, owl research goes on. As of now, everyone on the SNOWstorm team is healthy; most are working from home, but some have unfortunately experienced layoffs … Read More
Zugunruhe to You, Too!
We’re just a few weeks away from the spring equinox, and as the sun creeps higher in the sky and days begin the lengthen dramatically in the northern latitudes, this is when we start to expect some restlessness to set in among our tagged owls. And that’s exactly what’s been happening the past couple of weeks. It’s not a rush … Read More