Friday, January 17, 2014

Amazing migration!!

I see on the BirdGuides web site, a report of a Red-necked Phalarope from the Hebrides was fitted there with a geo-locater in 2012 and returned to the same site in 2013. The amazing bit is that it was tracked in the mean time to the Pacific coast of South America - Peru. A round trip of 16,000 miles.
I've not been able to copy the link but the full story is on the BirdGuides and probably the RSPB site?.

Managed to copy part of the report thanks to Bird Guides and RSPB
A tracking device, which weighs less than a paperclip, has helped scientists uncover one of the world's great bird migrations. It revealed that a Scottish Red-necked Phalarope migrated thousands of miles west across the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, a journey never recorded for any other European breeding bird. In 2012, the RSPB, working in collaboration with the Swiss Ornithological Institute and Dave Okill of the Shetland Ringing Group, fitted individual geolocators to ten phalaropes nesting on Fetlar (Shetland), in the hope of learning where they spend the winter.
After successfully recapturing one of the tagged birds when it returned to Fetlar last spring, experts discovered it had made an epic 16,000-mile round trip during its annual migration — flying from Shetland across the Atlantic, south down the eastern seaboard of the US, across the Caribbean, and Mexico, ending up off the coast of Peru. After wintering in the Pacific, it returned to Fetlar, following a similar route.

2 comments:

Jeff Cox said...

Thanks Dave - great item. We went to Fetlar a couple of years ago to see Red-necked Phal but we missed 'em by a day or two! So, off to Peru to get one then :)

ChrisJB said...

I read about this a couple of weeks back. It really is staggering.