©Jean Hall

From the beginning, Project SNOWstorm has taken a very unusual approach to funding raptor research. When we launched SNOWstorm in December 2013, it was on a wing and a prayer, a rapid response to an unprecedented and wholly unexpected mega-irruption of snowy owls, the largest since at least the 1920s.

The usual approaches to funding research — writing and submitting proposals, being rejected, refining those requests until either some foundation or agency says yes or you give up and move on — wasn’t feasible. Instead, we kicked off our work with anonymous gifts from three private donors who agreed to underwrite the purchase of the first six GPS/GSM transmitters we deployed on owls, provided at cost by Cellular Tracking Technologies.

Once we were underway, we decided to take a gamble on crowd-funding our work. I will admit that I was the skeptic of the bunch, but I was quickly proven wrong as a huge outpouring of interest and donations allowed us to tag 22 owls that first winter, with additional gift and transmitter sponsorships then and since by other nonprofits like bird clubs and Audubon chapters. It remains a unique model, but one that’s worked so well that more than 100 tagged owls later, and hundreds examined by our veterinary team, we are still funded almost entirely by small donations from the public. We are grateful for each and every one.

Our friends at the Ned Smith Center for Nature and Art in central Pennsylvania, which had already been supporting northern saw-whet owl research for many years, agreed in 2013 to serve as SNOWstorm’s institutional home, giving us needed administrative support. More importantly, it means that all donations to SNOWstorm are tax-deductible for U.S. citizens to the extent allowed by law. To try to offset all their staff time, we provide a modest 15 percent overhead fee on what we raise.

We take seriously the responsibility of husbanding those donations carefully, which is why I want to walk you through what we raised, and what we spent (and why) in the past year, from November 2023 to November 2024. (Our winter season starts in November with the first returning snowy owls, hence the odd fiscal year.)

From Nov. 2, 2023 to Nov. 1, 2024, Project SNOWstorm received $17,346.97 in donations, our only source of support.

The past year, generous donors contributed $17,346.97, both online through our GoFundMe campaign, which had a $15,000 goal last year, and via direct contributions by check or charitable fund disbursement to the Ned Smith Center. Those individual donations ranged from a few dollars to $3,000. Some $1,500 came from a fundraising trip in partnership with Destination: Wildlife, one we are repeating next February. We were also surprised and pleased to receive an unsolicited $500 conservation grant from the Akron Zoo in Akron, Ohio.

That’s it on the income side — donations, and only donations. Our expenses this past year totaled $19,923.80, so we ran a small deficit of $2,576.83, but we had sufficient cash reserves to cover it.

On the expense side, research costs are by far the biggest part of what we spent, totaling $16,689.08. Some of this represented equipment, including $7,720 to purchase four small Lotek satellite transmitters that were deployed this past summer (along with six older transmitters we partially funded in 2020) on juvenile snowy owls in the Canadian Arctic. We also spent $2,000 for our tech partners at CTT to refurbish six GSM transmitters that we purchased in previous years but were unable to deploy the past two winters because there were so few snowy owls; they now have new batteries and updated hardware and software, at less than a third the cost of six new ones, and are ready for this season.

Finally, we spent $3,987.70 for three new, slimmed-down CTT transmitters designed specifically to track previously injured snowy owls once they’re released from rehab, a new project we’ve discussed for years, and for which we received permission from the federal Bird Banding Lab to try this winter if there are suitable candidate owls.

Other research-related items: $191 to pay for satellite time for Otter, our lone owl with a hybrid GSM-Argos satellite transmitter (we only pay for satellite time from March-September, when his Argos component is online). We paid $327 to the Pennsylvania Animal Diagnostic Lab, which does all the laboratory testing for us on the salvaged snowy owls our veterinary team necropsies; this is a very low amount, even at the cut-rate PADL charges us, because there just weren’t a lot of owls to necropsy and test last winter. There were also odds and ends, like the woven Spectra ribbon we use to handcraft the transmitter harnesses we use, and which is worth the nearly $10 a yard it costs because it is both insanely tough and yet very soft and gentle on the owls’ skin, since the bird will be wearing the harness for life.

Our expenses during that 12-month period totaled $19,923.80, with all but a small overhead charge directly supporting our research work in some way. The travel outlay, for instance, primarily involved $2,500 in stopgap funding to close a transportation shortfall for this past summer’s Arctic work on Bylot Island.

We offer to reimburse our intrepid banders for their travel, gas and meal expenses when they’re in the field on our behalf, and sometimes they even take us up on it — though this past winter, again a very slow one, that totaled just $52.01.

What else? Shipping is expensive, because the transmitters are delicate and need to be sent by courier, whether we’re getting them out to banders or back to CTT for refurbishing; shipping costs were $659.56 this past year. We also had an emergency request through SNOWstorm team member J.F. Therrien, to help plug a budget hole caused by skyrocketing fuel costs for Laval University’s field work on Bylot Island in the High Arctic, where J.F. was able to deploy those 10 old and new satellite transmitters after years of pandemic delays. SNOWstorm’s $2,500 transportation grant allowed the expedition to move ahead, and as we detailed in an earlier update, all 10 transmitters were deployed.

One line item we don’t have is for salaries. As has been the case since the beginning, no one on the SNOWstorm team takes any kind of payment or stipend for their annual work with the project, whether it’s freezing outside trapping owls for transmitters, or conducting necropsies in the lab.

On occasion, we do provide financial support for individuals working on specific projects, as we have in the past to help cover Dr. Rebecca McCabe’s time conducting, analyzing and writing the first-ever global conservation status and population trend survey of snowy owls, one of the most important such projects ever for this species. Similarly, we have provided underwriting to cover staff time through Dr. Nicolas LeComte’s lab at Moncton University in New Brunswick to analyze our immense snowy owl health dataset and bring that analysis to publication in the near future.

By the way, Becca McCabe’s status and trends paper, about which we’ll share a lot more details in near future, has been accepted for publication in the prestigious journal Bird Conservation International. Normally, such articles sit behind hefty paywalls, limiting their availability, but we felt this one was important, so along an equal contribution by colleagues in Norway with the International Snowy Owl Working Group, SNOWstorm contributed $1,292 toward the cost of providing open access, so that anyone, anywhere, can freely read the paper without having to pay a fee.

Our overhead expense to the Ned Smith Center for all their work tracking donations, paying invoices and handling the unglamorous admin part of this project, besides providing the nonprofit umbrella that makes all of the donations we receive tax-deductible in the first place, was a bit more than $2,600. To be honest, their help is priceless.

That’s it. To all our supporters, thank you for entrusting us with your contributions. Know that we appreciate every one, and we will always stretch every penny until it, um, hoots.