Time for a weekend update on our 2017-18 cohort — the largest we’ve had since our first winter four years ago. We’ll start west and work our way east, but it’s a lot of owls. Ashtabula remains pretty faithful to his general territory near Sanborn, ND, and lately has been spending a lot of time roosting in a grove of … Read More
Dark Owl, White Owl
(To bring you some exciting news from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, we’re turning the microphone over to SNOWstorm collaborator Chris Neri of the Whitefish Point Bird Observatory.) Nova Mackentley and I were thrilled to begin collaborating with Project SNOWstorm in the winter of 2015-16. Working with snowy owls is an amazing experience in and of itself, but to do … Read More
Neighbors
One of the goals we set for ourselves this winter is to track the movements and interactions of neighboring owls, as we did several years ago with Whitefish Point and Chippewa in northern Michigan. So this winter we’ve made an effort to trap and tag snowies in close proximity to one another, starting with Island Beach and Lenape on the … Read More
The Three Amigos, and Other Owls
It’s always a little thrill when the cell phone vibrates and the text messages start coming in: “CTT Data Update: Unit #27236551 (Salisbury 4Y Male) has checked in.” And then another, and another, until we have the weekly report from our far-flung tribe. The three amigos (well, two amigos and an amiga) were back together on Amherst Island this past … Read More
All Kinds of Shaking Going On
Spring is really working on our tagged owls — even if 35 square miles of ice, up to eight feet thick, doesn’t sound much like spring to you. Up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where the snow is still waist-deep in places, Chippewa has finally budged from her winter-long home territory, where she’s been burning a hole in the … Read More
From Great Lake to Great Lake
The latest round of check-ins show that more and more of the tagged snowies are getting the itch to move — some in quite dramatic ways. For instance, Whitefish Point, who has rarely moved more than one section road from her winter territory on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan this winter, took a long ramble on March 31, flying about … Read More
Surprises, East to West
Thursday night was our weekly check-in. As always there were some surprises, and some owls we didn’t hear from…whether out of cell range, or suffering a temporarily low battery, we can’t say. Here are ones that checked in. Starting from the east, Orleans remains regular as clockwork along I-81 in upstate New York, just a few miles south of the … Read More