Jolene is a beautiful first-winter (now technically second-year) female snowy owl, tagged Jan. 26 in southwestern Ontario near the town of Atwood. (Bird handled and tagged under federal and provincial permit. ©Charlotte England)

Whether you’re reading this before or after the Big Game, here’s a little Superb Owl news for you all: We have two new snowies to introduce, one of which is in a very familiar place, keeping very familiar company.

Jolene and Carden are both first-winter females, both tagged by our stalwart colleagues Charlotte England and Malcolm Wilson of Toronto, as a result of a 10-day banding blitz across southern Ontario in late January. Jolene was captured Jan. 26, 2025, in almost the same spot where Charlotte and Mal caught Atwood last February, and where both Atwood and Newton have been spending time this winter. Their tracks have looked a bit like tangled spaghetti since all three have been sending in data.

Jolene is a unique exception to our naming protocol, which usually uses locations or place names for owl nicknames. In this case, Mal and Charlotte asked that we name the owl for a person, the first time we have ever done so. “Jolene” honors the memory of the deceased adult daughter of a couple in the area who have been longtime supporters of Charlotte and Mal’s banding efforts. They have our sympathy regarding their loss, and hope that Jolene the owl provides some comfort.

Like Jolene, Carden is a second-year female, born last summer somewhere in the Arctic, and tagged Jan. 31 on the Carden Alvar near Lake Simcoe, Ontario. (Bird handled and tagged under federal and provincial permit. ©Charlotte England)

Carden was tagged Jan. 31, 2025, near Lake Simcoe, at the very end of the expedition, and about 185 km (116 miles) northeast of where Charlotte and Mal usually trap. Carden is named for Carden Alvar — no, not another person, but a globally rare and unique ecosystem. Alvars are more common in northern Europe than in North America, where these sparsely vegetated, often seasonally flooded grasslands occur on thin limestone soils around the Great Lakes, kept free of woody trees and shrubs by frequent wildfires.

The Carden Alvar, one of the largest and best-protected alvars in the world, hosts a variety of rare plants and animals, including wildflowers like scarlet paintbrush and prairie-smoke, and summer breeding birds like upland sandpipers, grasshopper sparrows, eastern meadowlarks and especially eastern loggerhead shrikes, a Canadian nationally endangered bird, and a species that has all but disappeared from most of eastern North America. Carden Alvar holds the largest nesting population in Ontario. In winter, this wide-open landscape is custom-made for snowy owls and their prey.

Carden’s location (upper right) near Lake Simcoe, in comparison with the three-owl hangout of Newton, Atwood and Jolene to the southwest. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)

Since she was banded, Carden has been sticking close to her tagging location east ot the town of Brechin near a large quarry, one of many in the area (limestone, remember) — except for a very quick trip 12.5 km (7.75 miles) over to Lake Simcoe on Feb. 5, where she spent a couple of hours on the ice, then flew straight back.

Mal and Charlotte put in the time and the distance for these two owls. Over the course of those 10 days they racked up 3,400 km (2,100 miles), set their phai trap for 30 snowy owls, of which 11 showed some degree of interest, and four were caught. (Not every owl that’s trapped is suitable for a transmitter. They must meet certain body mass and condition thresholds, including that the 45-gram transmitter, harness and leg band together not exceed 3 percent of the owl’s weight. That eliminates thin and underfed owls, as well as healthy but naturally small males.)

Carden has been hanging out near one of the many limestone quarries in the area, except for a quick back-and-forth to Lake Simcoe. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)

Jolene, Atwood and Newton are all pretty much palling around the same neighborhood, which suggests lots of prey rather than any sense of chumminess. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)

Malcolm told me that a number of the snowies responded to the safely caged lure animal in the phai trap but landed short, spent a long time looking at it, and then eventually were flushed off by a vehicle or photographers. He and Charlotte suspect a lot of those suspicious owls were adults that they had banded in years past, and who have learned their lesson.

Mal and Charlotte weren’t only banding snowy owls on this epic expedition. This gorgeous light-morph rough-legged hawk, another Arctic-nesting species, is wearing both a standard metal leg band and a plastic band with a field-readable code, which any birder or researcher will be able to spot and report. (Bird handled and tagged under federal and provincial permit. ©Charlotte England)

In addition the snowies, the team was also banding other raptors (which, obviously, did not receive transmitters) including three each rough-legged and red-tailed hawks, an American kestrel, two barred owls and three northern shrikes, the bigger, badder, Arctic relative of the loggerhead shrike. Shrikes are considered “honorary” raptors, since they hunt and kill small vertebrates like birds and rodents. (I have had my knuckles shredded bloody by a northern shrike I was banding, and I’m just fine considering them to be raptors.)

Mal and Charlotte aren’t done, either. They have two additional transmitters that they’re going to try to deploy before the end of the month, which is usually our seasonal cutoff for tagging new owls. Up in Michigan, our colleagues Nova Mackentley and Chris Neri will be out on the Upper Peninsula in the next day or two as well looking to deploy a transmitter, something circumstances have prevented them from doing until now. As always, we appreciate the time and expertise these folks donate to Project SNOWstorm. We cover their fuel, food and lodging expenses when they’re out there, but they give us their time.

Farther east, Loren is still wintering on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, near Pointe-Marie opposite Repentigny, Québec. Rimouski, the former rehabilitation patient, seems to be doing fine in his undisclosed location, also on the south shore of the river, where he patrols a very narrow, roughly 16-km (10-mile) long stretch of farmland.

Jolene and Carden are wearing two of the newest generation of CTT’s solar-powered transmitters, as is Rimouski. Because we did not intend to post a publicly accessible tracking map for Rimouski, none of us — including CTT — initially realized that the new ES-400 transmitters he, Jolene and Carden are wearing, which operate through a new dedicated server system at CTT, do not link up with the interactive online maps that we use here at SNOWstorm.

Loren has been acting settled for the winter across the river from Repentigny, QC. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)

It’s an understandable oversight; we are the only ones among CTT’s hundreds of clients for which they provide that service. The maps were something they scrambled to introduce for us when our founding colleague and computer guru Don Crockett, who coded the original interactive maps we started with in 2014, died unexpectedly and far too young in 2017, and we were suddenly unable to access his proprietary platform.

CTT is working on a bridge system for this winter, and during the off-season will migrate all of our historical data to the new server so all the owl maps are running the same platform. But for the time being I’ll just need to produce periodic static maps like the ones we feature in this blog to cover Jolene and Carden (and any additional new owls we add). Please be patient. Fortunately, the online maps for birds carrying what we might think of as legacy units from 2023-24 or earlier, like Loren, Atwood and Newton, will still automatically update 24 hours after the usual Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday evening check-in times, and all the historical data from past owls is also available. With luck, we’ll soon be able to do the same for all our newly tagged birds as well.