FYI. It is amazing to see the maps where SNOW have been doing and what they are
up to.
Meena Haribal
Ithaca NY 14850
42.429007,-76.47111
http://haribal.org/
http://meenaharibal.blogspot.com/
________________________________
Scott Weidensaul of Project Snowstorm posted the following on bander's listserve
I wanted to give a quick update on Project SNOWstorm, the big snowy owl
research project this winter. Wednesday we tagged our 14th owl, an SY male that
USDA Wildlife Services trapped at the Philadelphia International Airport, and
which we relocated 55 miles to the west to New Holland, Lancaster County. At
the moment we have GPS/GSM-tagged owls in Minnesota (1), Wisconsin (3),
Pennsylvania (3), New York (2), New Jersey (2, originally tagged in MD and DE),
and Massachusetts (2). We're hopeful that we'll reach our goal of 20-25 tagged
owls within the next couple of weeks, while also collecting blood, feather and
tissue samples from live and DOA snowies owls through our cooperating network
of banders, rehabbers, agency personnel, wildlife vets and pathologists.
The results so far have been extraordinary, and provide a terrific
counterpoint to the PTT-based work that's been going on in the Arctic with
breeding adults. We've documented owls traveling up to 150 miles north along
the Atlantic coast, making nocturnal hunting excursions far out over open
water, presumably in pursuit of waterbirds, using channel markers and buoys as
perches. Those tagged along lakes Erie and Ontario have been tracked hunting
the ice edge, or even drifting halfway across the lake into Canadian waters on
wind-driven ice sheets. Still others (especially those in Midwestern farmland
and grassland) have rarely strayed more than a mile from their tagging point.
We've had two owls that couldn't be budged from airports -- one of which
returned 45 miles to Philadelphia, and was killed three weeks later when it was
hit by a jet. (We tried a number of times to recapture him, to no avail.)
This work has been possible because of incredible public support, including
more than $30,000 raised via an Indeigogo crowd-funding campaign, as well as
sponsorships by state and regional ornithological clubs and private donations.
Just as important, virtually everyone doing the hard work of trapping, tagging,
banding, sampling, testing, performing necropsies and so forth is doing it pro
bono, allowing us to maximize our research impact.
There's a lot more at
www.projectsnowstorm.org<http://www.projectsnowstorm.org/>, including
interactive maps of their tagged owls, updated every third day when their
transmitters check in.
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