Loren made a thankfully brief visit to the St-Hubert Airport, at lower center on the map, before moving back to safer farmland. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)

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 farther and farther up the St. Lawrence Valley, ever closer to Montréal. She spent part of last week shifting back and forth from one side of the river narrows to the other just off the tip of the island of Montréal, where the Prairie River joins the St. Lawrence, but by Jan. 7 she’d moved 22 km further down onto the southeast shore, where she did a thankfully brief fly-through at Montréal Municipal (St-Hubert) Airport in Longueuil. Let’s hope she stays away from the airfield; she was originally tagged, you’ll recall, after she was trapped at the Trudeau airport in Montréal. Snowy owls…they love those airports.

Rimouski, our first tagged rehabbed snowy, seems to be doing very well. We can only assume he’s not having any issues from his previously dislocated elbow, because since he was released Dec. 17 he’s traveled more than 96 km (60 miles), including spending time out on the frozen St. Lawrence River, before settling down the past week or so in a fairly small area, where I suspect he’s found a honey hole for prey. As we promised at the onset, we’re not going to publish a map or provide location information on him given his more sensitive status, but so far things look very promising.

Atwood (green) and Newton (purple) have been hanging around the same neighborhood near Moncton, ON, now that Newton’s wandering itch seems to have passed. (©Project SNOWstorm and Google Earth)

Jumping 630 km (almost 400 miles) west to southern Ontario, our two returning snowies there, Newton and Atwood, have at times practically been in each other’s back pocket, as the old saying goes, especially in the farmland near the hamlet of Monkton. There have been occasions when they’ve used the same utility pole (hydro pole to our Canadian friends), though never at the same time, because snowy owls, especially adults, can get testy about intruders in what they think of as their territory.

His transmitter’s solar panel all but completely obscured, Newton watches over the farmland of southern Ontario. (©Sylvie Tafts)

Newton had actually been doing a lot of roaming around southern Ontario in the weeks after he first arrived back south in mid-December, traveling up to the Bruce Peninsula and looping back south and east, a total of roughly 575 km (350 miles) of flying before settling down earlier this month. Atwood, on the other hand, seemed to know just where she wanted to go, and made a more or less direct flight to the Monkton area as soon as she arrived in late December. Local birder and photographer Sylvie Tafts shared some photos (taken with a long lens, from inside her vehicle) of Newton for sure, and probably Atwood, from this past week. I’m impressed Newton’s transmitter is maintaining a healthy charge, given that its solar panel is completely covered in feathers in that image.

Based on tracking data, this perched snowy owl is probably Atwood, but we can’t be certain. (©Sylvie Tafts)

It will be interesting to watch the tracking data for hints of interactions between these two. Female snowy owls average larger and heavier than males, and tend to be behaviorally and socially dominant over them. In years past we had the opportunity to see how three or four tagged snowies relocated from Wisconsin airports to the Buena Vista grasslands behaved, and it was clear that girls ruled.

Way out west, on the prairies of North Dakota, longtime SNOWstorm collaborator Matt Solensky from the USGS Northern Prairie Research Center has spent a lot of cold weekends looking for snowy owls, and coming up dry. While there’s been a modest irruption in the Great Lakes and Northeast, and what seem like normal numbers in the Canadian prairies to his north, there haven’t been a lot of snowy owls reported west of Minnesota in the U.S. But Matt’s going to continue to look. And in Ontario, our colleagues Charlotte England and Malcolm Wilson, who tagged both Newton and Atwood in years past, plan to be out later this month on an extended trapping swing through the southern part of the province, and may be adding new owls to the roster.

We’re also monitoring with concern the continuing impact of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), which in the past couple of weeks began sickening and killing snow geese in Pennsylvania, Delaware and Kentucky. The knock-on effects on species like eagles (and snowy owls) that feed on sick and dead waterfowl and other waterbirds continue to be serious. Scientists have documented population-level losses of bald eagles in the Southeast U.S., and peregrine falcons continent-wide, in the wake of this ongoing wildlife pandemic.

Because it’s impossible to survey snowy owls on their Arctic breeding grounds we really have no way of knowing how seriously the past several winters of HPAI have affected their population, but it can’t be good. There have already been several snowy owls confirmed dead from HPAI in the U.S. this winter, and the reported death of two more in late December in Tommy Thompson Park in Toronto is further reason for concern, though the cause of death is not yet known, and rodenticides have been suggested as the culprit in that case. It’s a dangerous world for raptors.