Well, we may finally have reached the end of the 2024-25 snowy owl season, less than two weeks before Memorial Day in the U.S. The last two owls we were still in contact with, Toronto and Rimouski, both failed to check in last evening, May 13, suggesting they may both be outside cell range as they go north. Toronto managed … 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
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
Breaking New Ground
For only the second time in Project SNOWstorm’s 11 seasons of telemetry tracking, we’ve fitted a previously injured, rehabilitated snowy owl with a transmitter to document its movements and long-term survival, a project we’ve been working toward for several years at the urging of our team of wildlife veterinarians and the rehabilitation community beyond, which wants to know how well … Read More