Here’s a breakdown of Project SNOWstorm’s 2024-25 expenses by category.

As we start a new winter season of snowy owl tracking, something that has only been possible over the past 14 12 seasons because of the continued support of a lot of people, I wanted to take a moment and look back at the preceding year and break down what we received in donations and what we spent on SNOWstorm’s various research projects.

From the start, Project SNOWstorm has depended entirely on small, crowd-funded donations; we receive no government or foundation support. We therefore take very seriously our responsibility to husband that money carefully, and make sure that it’s spent as wisely – and transparently – as possible.

What follows is a breakdown of donations and expenses from December 2024 through the end of November 2025.

On the revenue side, there is, as I said, just one source – you. In the past year, both through online donations via the annual GoFundMe campaign and direct contributions via check to our institutional home, the Ned Smith Center for Nature and Art in central Pennsylvania, donors contributed $33,658.14. Paypal, which handles the online GFM donations, assessed us $473.18 in bank card fees.

Because the Ned Smith Center is a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit, all donations to the project are tax-deductible for U.S. taxpayers. (We’re especially grateful for donations from our Canadian friends, who receive no tax benefit.) The center’s staff handles all incoming donations, pays the bills, provides the accounting – and they do it all for a modest overhead, which in the past year came to just $2,923.97. Considering the staff time they devote to this throughout the year, we’ve suggested asked that they bump that rate up to 15 percent, which we feel more fairly compensates them for staff time and trouble.

On the expense side, we spent $24,807.55, with the largest single expenditure being the purchase or refurbishment of GPS/GSM transmitters from our longtime partners, Cellular Tracking Technologies, for a total of $8,085. Shipping those sensitive instruments via FedEx to our banding teams cost $807.69, while we paid an additional $142 to the Woods Hole Group at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts for Argos satellite time, allowing us to track our single remaining GSM/satellite hybrid-tagged owl, Otter, from March through September.

Until 2022, we usually spent several thousand dollars a year conducting toxicology and other lab tests on tissue samples from dozens of salvaged snowy owls our volunteer veterinary team necropsied each winter, but with the advent of highly pathogenic avian influenza, very few salvaged snowy owl carcasses have not tested positive for HPAI and were not incinerated, so our expenses last year for lab work, through the Pennsylvania Animal Diagnostic Laboratory System that has always provided that service, was just $604.

While some snowies have already been confirmed with avian flu this winter, our veterinary team has been able to necropsy at least one, and we’re hopeful we may be able to again collect vital health, disease and environmental contaminant data this winter from those owls that are found dead or die in rehab and don’t have avian flu. It’s been distressing not to be able to keep that dataset current, especially as we saw a dramatic rise in the rate of rodenticide exposure in the years leading up to the HPAI epidemic.

Charlotte England and Malcolm Wilson of Toronto, Ontario, are two of more than a dozen experienced raptor banders who volunteer their time to trap and tag snowy owls for Project SNOWstorm, being reimbursed only for travel and fuel expenses.

One line item you won’t find in our expense report is one for salaries or stipends. No one on the SNOWstorm team is paid for what they do with the project – they volunteer their time, or are able to help through their day jobs with resource agencies or conservation organizations. The banders and scientists in the U.S. and Canada who actually do the trapping and tagging, spending days in the cold, also contribute their time, but we do reimburse them for their fuel, food and lodging expenses. Last winter that totaled $2,007.21.

We will contract with experts when we have specific projects that require specialized skills, and we did so twice in the past year. While Project SNOWstorm was founded to study the winter movement ecology of snowy owls, our transmitters collect highly granular data when the birds are in the Arctic and subarctic, and we’ve been wondering for a while what information and insights could be mined from those spring/summer data.

So, in collaboration with Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania, where longtime team members Dr. Rebecca McCabe and Dr. Jean-François Therrien are staff biologists, this past summer we hired a newly minted Ph.D., Dr. Diego Gallego Garciá, a Spanish-born scientist living in Argentina, who is a whiz at movement data analyses, something he honed during his doctoral research on endangered Chaco eagles.

Whether it’s possible to predict the movement of summering snowy owls is the focus of a new post-doctoral study underwritten in part by Project SNOWstorm, in cooperation with colleagues at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary and the International Snowy Owl Working Group.
(©Jean Hall)

For this post-doctoral study, we asked Diego to dig into a huge dataset encompassing more than 40 SNOWstorm owls, plus tracking data from another roughly 40 owls contributed by International Snowy Owl Working Group colleagues like Dr. Karen Wiebe, formerly of University of Saskatchewan, and ISOWG members from Norway who had underwritten the tagging of other owls in Saskatchewan.

Hawk Mountain covered Diego’s travel from Argentina, as well as his lodging and board during the several months he was working there on the first phase of this study, while SNOWstorm contributed a $10,000 stipend to cover his work on the study. Our hope is that, by looking backwards at past summer movements, we may detect patterns that would allow us to predict where snowy owls will breed in the future. Right now, we have no way of knowing where these highly nomadic birds are likely to be nesting from one year to the next.

The initial analysis, covering the first 40 SNOWstorm owls, offers some intriguing clues. Diego, working with Becca and JF, still has a lot of work to do in the months ahead as he finishes the analysis of the remaining Prairie Provinces owls, and prepares the results for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, but he has already identified several areas in the central Canadian Arctic that have, over the years, tended to draw snowy owls back again and again, and which may be of particular importance for their conservation. Given that snowy owls have just been proposed for listing under the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), along with more than 40 other species, this information is even more important.

Dr. Diego Gallego Garciá presents the preliminary results of his post-doc study on summer snowy owl movements to a packed room at the Raptor Research Foundation meeting in Costa Rica in October. (©Rebecca McCabe)

We also covered Diego’s flight to Costa Rica to present his preliminary results at the Raptor Research Foundation’s annual meeting in October, as well as his lodging and meals there. (Hawk Mountain covered his conference registration and expenses). Our costs for that trip was $1,188.61. We’ll have a guest blog from Diego, Becca and JF in the weeks ahead to share what they’ve found so far.

We also launched a multi-year project to finally do something we’ve wanted to do since the start of Project SNOWstorm – create a pre-K to Grade 12 curricula series that can be offered free to educators, using our telemetry and snowy owl health data. We’ve always been happy to make our tracking data available for educators and students for classroom or science fair use (we just ask that no one publish anything peer-reviewed with it), but we hope that by creating lesson plan packages tailored for every grade, we can get snowy owl science into more classrooms.

In this case, we’re working with Megan Roselli, Hawk Mountain’s education director, and with William and JeanMarie MacKay, two highly experienced educators with the Total Learning Experience Institute at Alvernia University in southern Pennsylvania. We’re finalizing on the first section, pre-K through K, for which we paid TLX $1,000, and Hawk Mountain $500 to cover Megan’s time. We expect to have the whole suite of materials (pre-K-K; Grades 1-2; Grades 3-5; Grades 6-8; Grades 9-12) complete and field-tested by the winter of 2029-30, publishing one new level per year. As the complexity of the lesson packages grows – and the secondary-level outlines are complex – the cost of developing them will also rise.

Totaled, those expenses come to $24,807.55, leaving a balance for the year of $8,850.59, which goes in the bank. (In 2023-24 we ran a slight deficit, so this gives us a bit of a cushion.)

Finally, I want to make a point of thanking, individually, the core team members and volunteer banders of Project SNOWstorm. These are mostly folks who have been with us from the beginning, and who, as I said, are doing this because they care about snowy owls, not because they’re making any money from the effort. It’s a privilege to work with each and every one of them.

David F. Brinker, Maryland Department of Natural Resources

Ellen Bronson, DVM, Maryland Zoo, MD

Sherril Davison, DVM, University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center, PA

Cindy Driscoll, DVM, Maryland Department of Natural Resources (retired)

Charlotte England and Malcolm Wilson, Toronto, ON

Falcon Environmental, Montréal, QC

Guy Fitzgérald, DVM, Clinique des Oiseaux de Proie, Université de Montréal, QC

Jason Geurard, Cellular Tracking Technologies, NJ

Steve Huy, Frederick, MD

Nova Mackentley and Chris Neri, Whitefish Point, MI

Melissa Mance-Coniglio, NY

Dr. Rebecca McCabe, Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, PA

Tom McDonald, Rochester, NY

Michael Lanzone, Cellular Tracking Technologies, NJ

Dr. David La Puma, Cellular Tracking Technologies, NJ

Andrew McGann, York, PA

Erica Miller, DVM, University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Trisha Miller, Conservation Science Global, NJ

Frank Nicoletti and Emily Pavlovic, Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory, Duluth, MN

Norman Smith, Massachusetts Audubon (retired)

Matt Solensky, USGS Northern Prairie Research Center, ND

Dr. Jean-François Therrien, Hawk Mountain Sanctuary

Drew Weber, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, NY