Belle - 2012
'09 maps for: Bea -- Buck -- Caley -- Claws -- Conomo -- Hix -- Hudson 09 -- Isabel -- Katy -- L.R. --
Moffet -- Mr. Hannah -- Ozzie -- Penelope -- Rafael
2010 maps for: Belle -- Buck -- Gunny -- Hudson -- Mr. Hannah -- Neale -- North Fork Bob -- Penelope -- Sanford -- Sr. Bones -- Thatch
2011 maps: Belle -- Buck -- Henrietta -- Katbird -- North Fork Bob -- Pemi -- Saco -- Sanford -- Sr. Bones -- Snowy -- Thatch -- Tucker
2012 maps: Art -- Belle -- Bridger -- Chip -- Cutch -- Jill -- North Fork Bob -- Rammie -- Snowy -- Sr. Bones -- Thatch
2013 maps: Art -- Belle -- Bridger -- North Fork Bob -- Rammie -- Snowy -- Sr. Bones
Osprey main page -- Migration page -- Migration09 -- Migration10 -- Migration 11 -- Migration 12 -- Migration 13 -- Home Page

20 Sep-26 Oct 2012.
     Belle does nothing small time. Her first trip south was the farthest east of any bird we've tracked (she was just a couple hundred miles west of Bermuda, where Ospreys have been recorded--(obviously juveniles), she went the farthest south of any bird we've tracked, and here she just pops down from Delaware to the Bahamas in 2 days!
     Belle pushed south but stayed on Cabo Beata for a week before heading across the Caribbean to Colombia.
     She's now in Brazil with just a few days to go before she gets to her wintering area.

Scroll down for all her maps for the year, or...

Skip to spring migration, or...

Skip to the start of fall migration.
June 6, 2012.
     Belle is back on Martha's Vineyard and spending a lot of time around Deep Bottom Cove. Mark Alan Lovewell got this great shot of Belle flying over the cove. This is the first time anyone has photographed one of our juveniles after the return from the 18 months they spend on the wintering grounds (waters?). 
     She is hanging around with a gang of birds--at least 4 others--they're probably all young birds that haven't set up territories. They will spend most of the summer on Martha's Vineyard, although they may wander off to the mainland. They're learning where the good fishing is and prospecting for a nest site and mate.

Scroll down to follow Belle's whole year or...

Jump to the start of spring migration, or

Pick up migration in Haiti, just before "the resurrection," or

Follow her movements after her return to the Vineyard
  May 19, 2012.
     She made it! On Apr 13th, Belle started her first migration north, 18 months after she began her first migration south as a naive 5-month old fledgling. 37 days later, she was back home on Martha's Vineyard.
     Her trip out over the Atlantic was the farthest east of any bird we have followed--she didn't miss Bermuda by much! (Only juveniles do this, and that's because they don't know there's a safer, but longer route south down the east coast. They learn that on their first trip north.)
     She gave us a real scare in Haiti (scroll on!), but is currently safe and sound back home.
    
 
     You know the routine by now!--Scroll down for the details.
1-31 Jan 2012. Pretty much a carbon copy of December.
1-29 Feb 2012. Belle seems to have settled back down at her recently favorite spot.
1-29 Feb 2012. A close-up view of February's activity.
Dec 2010 - Mar 2012. Belle has covered a lot of ground in the 15 months she's been in southern Amazonian Brazil. This is a pretty typical juvenile Osprey. They find a place they like, make forays out in various directions for a few months, and then settle down for the duration.
     (We note, comparing the Feb and Dec road trips, that not everything goes down the drain counterclockwise south of the equator!)
     The vast clearing visible in most of the state of Rondonia is the result of Brazil's first successful, dedicated colonization program, which was initiated back in the 70s.
     Here's a summary of the sad situation of the devastation of the rainforests of Rondonia. That whole state was pretty much continuous rainforest 50 years ago.
Mar 2012. Belle spent most of the time along the Rio Madeira where she's been for most of 2012. She did make a quick, 3 day trip upriver to a spot she knows well. She decided the fishing was better back downriver, so she returned and spent the rest of the month there.
1-15 Apr 2012. Belle is heading home! She took off on the 13th and stopped that night in an area she explored in March 2011.
     She's wasting no time, covering 450 mi. (720 km) in 3 days.
The amazing thing about this map is how she took off on a heading straight to Hispaniola. She was flying over completely unknown terrain--the vast, flat expanse of the Amazon Basin--with nothing to guide her but some sense of the earth's magnetic field. She just knows where she needs to go. (The yellow line is her trip south back in 2010.)
     As we'll see, she changed course a bit to the west as she progressed, winding up at the Gulf of Venezuela, 180 miles (280 km) east of where she made landfall in South America some 17 months earlier. Try that without your GPS unit!
      Mind boggling.
15-19 Apr 2012. Belle was covering new ground here, somehow sensing that she needed to go northwest, rather than northeast.
19-25 Apr 2012. Belle worked around the Gulf of Venezuela up to the Guajira Peninsula before taking on the Caribbean.
25 Apr - 1 May 2012. Belle crossed the Caribbean without incident.
     Hard to say why she turned to the northeast as she neared Jamaica. Maybe the wind shifted. And does the turn to due east mean that she saw land and went for it rather than continuing north to Cuba?
This map and the next show us how migratory routes are shaped by geography. While less averse to migrate over large expanses of open water than those raptors that really depend on thermals, Ospreys stay over land as long as possible, as long as they are heading in the appropriate general direction (north in spring, south in fall). This is true of most birds, and it's why south-pointing peninsulae (is that just too tacky?) like Cape May are such great spots to watch migration in the fall. Similarly, the Guajira Peninsula in Colombia would be a phenomenal place to watch Ospreys (and who knows what else?!) migrate north in the spring.
Here's a closer look at how Belle (blue track, orange balloons) and Thatch (red and red) were funneled to this northernmost spit of South America.
     We can only speculate about why they split tacks at some point southeast of Jamaica, but it probably is related to wind direction.
     We can infer from all the Ospreys we've followed that they really don't care about details in the middle of their migration--they "go with the flow" and let the wind push them a bit east or west--as long as they're staying over land and heading in the right general direction. When they get close to their destination, then true navigation kicks in and they head for their nest or wintering area, whichever way the winds are blowing.
29 Apr-1 May 2012. Belle moved through Port au Prince and settled down on the shore of Lake Saumâtre, the largest lake in Haiti and the second largest lake in Hispaniola after Lake Enriquillo, where our Martha's Vineyard youngster from 2011 spent quite a bit of time on his way south last fall.
28-29 Apr 2012. Before getting to Lake Saumâtre, Belle spent a couple of days fishing around Lake Miragoane (one of the largest freshwater lakes in the Caribbean).
[Here's what I wrote a couple of hours ago:] No movement from the transmitter for 2 days. Either she lost the transmitter or died.

HA! That's what I thought for a day until the next data came in! She's fine. I had already written her obituary, only to discover with the next data download that she's merrily flying around Lake Saumâtre [don't ask about the change in fonts--certain whims of Microsoft's SharePoint Designer are incomprehensible to us lowly mortals]. I don't have time to add the most recent data, but I can confirm that's she's still with us. How we could get 26 hours' worth of locations from exactly the same point is hard to figure. Either the weather was so bad for that whole time that she didn't move--and that doesn't make sense because these locations are all out in the open, not where you'd expect an Osprey to weather a storm, or she was moving around a bit, but every time the GPS took a fix (on the hour) she happened to be back on her perch. I don't want to figure out what the chances of that are, but one or the other of those explanations has to fit the bill.

 

The next series of maps has been put together by a guest author. Chris Keene, from Berry College, was one of my ornithology students this spring. His class project was tracking Belle for a section of her trip north. So, here are his narrative and maps. I've butted in a few times with some comments (in italics).

April 30 – May 8th. This is Lake Saumatre in Haiti, where Belle stayed for about 9 days. There must have been some great fishing there! [pretty busy for a bird we thought was dead!]

May 9th. Finally, after resting (that whole Voodoo resurrection thing was probably tiring) for over a week, Belle continues her trip north 131 Kilometers

Here is a close-up of where Belle rested for the night. She is only 3.25 Kilometers from the ocean after electing to go around the mountains on Haiti’s Northern Border. Mountains generally funnel migrating birds in a single direction because birds do not want to travel over them.

May 10th. Astonishingly, Belle travels 514 Kilometers in 12 hours over the Caribbean, before resting on the little island of Rum Cay.

May 11th. After island hopping for 11 hours, Belle rests 358 Kilometers from the Island of Rum Cay on an island just north of Nassau, Bahamas. She’s just 278 Kilometers from Florida!

May 12th. 426 Kilometers later, Belle makes it to Florida! She rests just after crossing Cape Canaveral.

Here is a close up of Where Belle rested the night of the 12th, Right next to the Kennedy space center.

May 13th. Belle is making her way quickly up the coast heading home! 302 Kilometers in 10 hours. About 3 P.M. She slows over a river just northwest of Brunswick, GA, (just about where Thatch is hanging out) presumably for a fish dinner!

Here is a close up of the food stop during the trip of May 13th.

May 14th. Belle goes 302 Kilometers in 10 hours, almost covering South Carolina in one day. Along the way, she stops again at another river for food.

May 14th. 356 Kilometers later, Belle makes it to the middle of North Carolina. Halfway through, GPS points were not received, but the Argos data was in (which is a little less accurate), so we can see where she stopped for the night.
  16-17 May 2012. [OK, I'm back at the helm.... Anyone else want to ghost write for me?] Belle is a bird on a mission! No messing around here. She's just cruising up the coast. Remember, she's never been here before. Her first trip south was way out over the open Atlantic--at one point she was only about 200 miles from Bermuda! 
  17-18 May 2012 - Belle spent the morning between the Navesink River and Sandy Hook Bay before venturing north a little before 10:00AM. On her way over Manhattan, whe might have been spotted by a birder in Central Park!
  18-19 May 2012 - Belle seemed to have been going so fast that she couldn't make the turn at Long Island Sound and wound up spending the night of the 19th just west of Boston. On the 19th she made it to about Gloucester north of Boston and then made the turn for home. Four and a half hours later, around 4PM, she was back on the Vineyard, 582 days after she left to start her first migration on 16 October 2012.
  19 May 2012 - When Belle got to Boston, she was on familiar ground. She made a 4-day "road trip" up here back in September of 2010 when she was just a pup trying out her new wings! So, it was a piece of cake to find home from there.
     Her amazing journey from the Rio Madeira, at the southern fringe of Brazil's Amazon Basin, covered 4,775 miles (7,688 km). She did it 37 days, but 10 of those days were rest stops, so it was 27 days of migration, averaging 176 miles/day.
     Could we have a round of applause, please?!
     Now we get to watch as she spends her first summer back in her breeding range. Will she spend the summer on the Vineyard or explore southern New England, the way Penelope did a few years back. She's already proven a much more capable navigator than Buck, who took about 4 months and almost 9,000 miles of wandering AFTER he got back to the States to find his natal area! 
19 May-3 June 2012 - Belle spent most of her first 2 weeks back in her 'hood. She did spend most of 4 days over on Cape Cod.
26-29 May 2012 - Belle skipped over to Cape Cod and spent a few days fishing freshwater ponds around Falmouth and Woods Hole. As we see in the next map, Belle knew these ponds and has a good memory.
28 July - 15 August 2010 - Here's the map from Belle's first summer, back in 2010. Her one and only excursion off the Island was to the very ponds that she's now visiting.
1-12 June 2012 - Belle spent most of the first half of June on Martha's Vineyard. She was spotted hanging around with 4 or 5 other Ospreys, probably other young recently returned to the Vineyard, on Tisbury Great Pond. She also did some fishing around Sengekontacket Pond between Edgartown and Oak Bluffs.
     She did buzz over to Cape Cod at noon on June 11th, but was back 2 hours later.
14-24 June 2012 - Belle really likes the Deep Bottom Cove off of Tisbury Great Pond and spent most of this 10-day stretch there.
24 June - 2 July 2012 - Belle spent quite a bit of time around Edgartown. In fact, Dick Jennings, my partner in all things Osprey on MVY, spotted her perched on the mast of a schooner anchored just off Edgartown.
2-14 July 2012 - Belle has found some good fishing in Katama Bay and is still working Sengekontacket Pond.
14-24 July 2012 - Deep Bottom Cove is still headquarters. There aren't any poles set up right there, but there are plenty of pines, and it seems like more and more of our Vineyard Ospreys are "going retro" and nesting in trees. (It's still a small percentage--3 or 4 out of about 80 nests each year.) So maybe next year Belle will come back and nest here.
24 July-4 Aug 2012 - Deep Bottom Cove continues to be Headquarters for Belle. She's also hunting a bit off South Beach, probably catching young bluefish.
4-24 Aug 2012 - On August 10th, Belle left the Vineyard and has been fishing over on Cape Cod for the past two weeks.
10-24 Aug 2012 - Detailed view of Belle's locations. She's been hunting quite a bit out in Buzzards Bay and really likes Crooked Pond. She also likes Coonamessett Pond--and with a name like that, who couldn't like it? New England has the best place names of anywhere.
22 Aug-3 Sep 2012 - Belle continues to focus her activity around Long Pond with plenty of fishing forays out into Buzzards Bay.
3-17 Sep 2012 - Belle was doing a lot of fishing out in Buzzards Bay. Word is that the Bay was full of young bluefish--just the right size for an Osprey.
20-21 Sep 2012 - Belle is off to the races--or South America, at least.
     In the map, we can see Belle's early wandering up towards Boston (in orange) and then her departure out over the Atlantic back in 2010. We also see her return this spring (green track).
     So, what does this tell us? She didn't retrace her track to South America out over the Atlantic, so she knew that there was an overland route back south if she started out heading west instead of due south. But she also didn't have to retrace her route.
21 Sep 2012 - This is a funny sort of day, migration-wise. She started off moving south, but then moved back northeast and then headed south before settling down for the night north of Federalsburg, MD. We're missing 4 hours of data between 1 PM (the location up by the Chester River) and the roost area at the bottom of this map. The weather wasn't favorable for migration, so she was just wandering around, waiting for the right wind.
23 Sep 2012 - A big cold front came through moved through and behind it came strong winds out of the north. Belle took advantage and headed south.
     She took off around 7 AM, early for a day's start, and was cooking along at over 30 mph.
     Nine hours later, she was at Cape Lookout at the southern end of North Carolina's Outer Banks. This would be a normal day's migration, but our gal Belle just kept on flying out over the Atlantic.
     Lots of adults we've tracked do this. They almost all wind up making landfall somewhere along the Florida coast.
     At her last signal on the 23rd, she had traveled 434 miles (700 km) averaging 31 mph.
24 Sep 2012 - You go, girl! Rather than head to Florida, she headed southeast and wound up on Eleuthra Island, (where she'd been on her trip north earlier in the spring) 35 hours and 959 miles (1,544 km) later. She averaged 27.4 mph (44 kph).
25 Sep-5 Oct 2012 - Belle passed through Cuba for a few hours on the 26th en route to Haiti. She spent one night there and then then moved over into the D.R. She made it down to Cabo Beata on the 29th and spent a week there before setting out to cross the Caribbean.
29 Sep - 05 Oct 2012 - Belle spent a week here stocking up before pushing off for points south. We had a young bird spend quite a bit of time here year a few years back on its way south.
5-13 Oct 2012 - Belle had smooth sailing across the Caribbean. She continued south along the shores of Lake Maracaibo and is now in the Venezuelan llanos.
     Assuming she's going to return to the Rio Madeira down in the southernmost Amazon, she has 1,140 miles (1,840 km) to go.
10-13 Oct 2012 - Belle has stopped along a river in the amazing sand dunes of southern Venezuela in the state of Apure.
     She spent 8 days in this area before heading south again. 
17-20 Oct 2012 - Belle is heading south--full speed ahead. She passed into Colombia on the 17th, may have slipped back into Venezuela on the 18th, and then on the 19th she was in Colombia, then Brazil, then Colombia, then finally back into Brazil.
     She's somewhere between 100 and 200 miles east or west of her first trip south in 2010 or her first trip north this spring.
 
19-25 Oct 2012 - Belle wandered onto her northbound track sometime on the 25th.
23-25 Oct 2012 - Belle is only a couple of days away from her wintering waters along the Rio Madeira at the southern fringe of the Amazon Basin.
25-28 Oct 2012 - Belle is back in her Brazilian home. She has spent more time here by far than anyplace else. Her first "winter" was about 17 months. Including around her nest and migrations both north and south, she's spent 13 months away from this area in northern Rondonia, Brazil.
     This emphasizes a new perspective we have on migration. We used to think that all the birds that breed in North America are "our" birds, who go south to avoid starvation in the winter. Now, for many species, we consider them tropical birds that migrate north to turn a very abundant resource (food) into baby birds. In the case of migrant songbirds--warblers, tanagers, orioles, etc., those resources are insects feeding on the spring flush of leaves as deciduous forests awaken from their winter dormancy. In the case of our Ospreys, especially those of the eastern seaboard, those resources are marine fish such as herring and especially menhaden, that migrated up the coast in almost unimaginable numbers each spring. (Read The Most Important Fish in the Sea for a fascinating take on menhaden.)
28 Oct-7 Nov 2012 - Belle is resting up from her long migration a little bit southeast of where she spent the last few months prior to migrating last April.
Nov 2012 - Belle spent most of her time on the Rio Madeira, but did spend some time fishing on lakes and smaller rivers as far as 9 mi. (15 km) from her favorite area on the south bank of the Madeira.
Dec 2012 - Belle is spending more time close to the river.
Jan-Mar 2013 - Belle seems to be finding all the fish she needs in these small lakes alongside the Rio Madeira. She's acting like an adult this winter, restricting her activity to a very restricted area. The core area outlined here in yellow is only 1.8 square miles (4.8 km^2).
Here's the main reason that adult mortality is so much lower than juvenile mortality. The map on the left shows all the ground that juvenile Belle covered once she settled down in southern Amazonia. She was clearly in the real estate market. During her second winter (map on the right) we see that she has barely moved all winter. She still has a month or so to go before heading north, but it's a safe bet that she won't move much until it's time to head north. (When am I going to learn not to make such bold predictions? I know, I know--never. Hey, I did say it's a safe bet--not a sure thing!)  


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