Page 10 The Dispatch/Maryland Coast Dispatch January 3, 2014 . . Project Seeks To Tag Four More Snowy Owls On Assateague FROM PAGE 9 “The owl that was tagged on Assateague has since flown to Cape Henlopen, where it spent some time on the lighthouse, and then continued across the Delaware Bay to the mouth of a tidal creek in Cumberland County, N.J.,” said David La Pluma, a product specialist with Leica Sport Optics, which is tracking the data. “This represents only two days of data. Can you imagine what we can learn with dozens of marked owls over the course of a year or more?” Currently, Project SNOWstorm has five transmitters to put on snowy owls, which could expand the effort to track their movements and gain a better understanding of the ongoing irruption, according to Carrie Samis, education coordinator with the Maryland Coastal Bays Program. “One bird, a hatch-year male, was tagged at Assateague and fitted with a solar-powered transmitter,” she said this week. “Four additional transmitters are ready to be fitted. The field team has been out, on and off, over the holidays to identify birds for tagging, each in different locations.” Project SNOWstorm researchers David Brinker and Scott Weidensaul recognized the current snowy owl irruption as a unique opportunity to learn more about the birds and helped initiate the tagging program. The effort is gaining momentum across much of the northeast where the snowy owls are appearing in large numbers. Each solar-powered transmitter weighs about 40 grams, which, per scientific protocol, is less than 3 percent of the bird’s body weight, according to Samis. With one snowy owl tagged on Assateague already and four more transmitters ready for an appropriate host bird, the research team hopes to expand on the program in the coming weeks as the irruption continues. It can cost as much as $3,500 to fit a bird with a transmitter, but the Project SNOWstorm team is expected to launch a fundraising campaign this month to generate funding for more transmitters. According to Samis, who has been blogging about the owls on the Maryland Coastal Bays Program’s website, the growing team of scientists and researchers are coordinating efforts to collect data from rehabbers across the country when sick or injured birds show up. Additional data may be collected, including blood samples, which can help scientists assess the health status of the snowy owls inundating the area. Identifying individual birds by sex and color pattern will increasingly improve as more birds are documented. However, there is little evidence to explain the current irruption of snowy owls across Delmarva and much of the mid-Atlantic region. Adequate food sources are a major factor in changes to migration patterns, but there is little indication food scarcity is driving the current anomaly. Initially, scientists believed a food shortage was driving the birds further south, but the preliminary data is showing this current irruption includes a lot of healthy young birds. “It seems that this big irruption is driven by excellent reproductive success, not food scarcity,” said Brinker. In most years, there are irruptions of other migratory birds on Assateague and other beach habitats along the mid-Atlantic, but they go largely unnoticed by non-scientists and non-birdwatchers because they aren’t as readily visible or recognized. Standing about two feet tall and weighing around four pounds and densely covered with thick white plumage, the snow owls easily stand out along the local winter landscape.