2015 Spring - All Birds

Updates:

(Scroll up for interactive map)

21 April 2015

With the inexplicably late arrival on 21 April of North Fork Bob on his eastern Long Island summer range, all the birds, with the exception of New Hampshire teenager Artoo (born and tagged in 2013) are back on their summer ranges. Artoo almost made it out of South America and then changed his mind about crossing the Caribbean. He retreated 260 miles back into Venezuela. Follow his continued antics, plus the spring and summer movements of all the other birds on new interactive maps: Mid-Atlantic Summer and New England Summer.

15 April 2015:

Nick is finally back on Tangiers Island. North Fork Bob is really late--only just in North Carolina. And Artoo is lingering in Venezuela. He may set the record for the latest return to North America of all our juveniles.

5 April 2015:

Quick status update, while we wait for the maps to get fixed. Belle is home on Cape Cod. She arrived at 11AM on the 4th. Donovan returned to his nest at 5PM on 2 April. Snowy spent the night of the 4th in central NJ. Ron Harper was in northern NC late on the 3rd. North Fork Bob was in eastern Cuba when he last checked in on the 5th. Nick, finally got going and is somewhere in Cuba now. Bringing up the rear is Artoo, our 2013 juvenile from NH, who is well into Venezuela now, very close to where North Fork Bob spends his winters. Edwin is back in CT, and Charlie got back to his nest on Fishers Island on 2 April. On the Chesapeake, Woody and Quin are home, and Crabby was in SE Georgia late afternoon of the 5th. Woody arrived on the 1st just as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation crew was setting up a replacement nest platform for him.

31 March 2015:

North Fork Bob is finally on the move. He left his winter range on the 30th, 8 days behind his departure last year. The only adult left in S.A. is Nick. As of the 31st, he's 2 weeks late for departing, based on last year's schedule. Artoo, an almost-two-yr old from New Hampshire, started his first trip north on the 30th.

10 March 2015:

Belle and Ron Harper both decided to start north on the 8th of March. This was 6 days earlier than Belle has ever started (this is her 4th migration north) an 11 days earlier than Ron left last year on his first trip north with one of our transmitters.

21 February 2015:

Snowy is our second bird to head north. This will be her third spring migration. She was tagged as a fledgling on Martha's Vineyard in the summer of 2011. She's oldest surviving juvenile. She spent her first winter-and-a-half at this spot in Venezuela. On her second migration, she short-stopped and spent the winter in Cuba. She got a late start home last spring, but had such a head start on all the birds leaving South America, that she wasn't that late getting home. Last fall she decided to do the whole migration. Now she's one of the early birds heading north. Maybe this will be the year she finally finds a mate and nests. Talons crossed!

She got started north on Feb 18th, but didn't get very far before looping back to her winter home. Probably forgot her passport. On the 20th she took off for real. I wonder if she'll stop in Cuba again as she did on her first trip north.

19 February 2015:

Edwin must have logged onto the Internet once he found cell coverage in central Colombia. As soon as he reported in to us, he turned around and headed back south for the next four days!

15 February 2015:

Edwin is once again the first bird to head north, and this year he left even earlier than last. We don't know exactly when he left his wintering area down in Brazil--there's a gap in the data--but when he found a cell tower in NE Colombia and checked in, he was 3 days ahead of his schedule from last year.

 

24 January 2015:

It's not usual to get a surprise in the middle of the winter. At least it wasn't when we had only satellite transmitters on our Ospreys. Now that some of our birds carry cell-tower transmitters, we occasionally have birds pop up after long silences when they wander into an area with celll tower coverage. This is what happened with Crabby, a female we tagged on Kent Island in Chesapeake Bay last spring.

In the fall, Crabby migrated to the northeastern coast of South America. She arrived in French Guiana on October 4th. It looked like she was going to settle down there. Then, just a day later, we stopped getting signals from her. I was worried because it did look like she had settled down, so we shoud have continued to get sporadic messages from her over the course of the winter. She was on the outskirts of Cayenne, the capitol of French Guiana. So that suggested cell coverage should be good, but it also meant she might have a high likelihood of being shot.

After 3 months with no signals, I assumed she was dead or had just moved to a spot without cell coverage (there's much more down in South America than one would expect). In either case, we probably would have to wait until spring when she either showed up again somewhere along her migration route, or just never reappeared, which would have meant something had happened to her.

So it was a nice surprise to get an email with data from a transmitter number I didn't recognize. (Each message from a cell-tower bird has the ID of the bird.) It had been so long since I'd heard from her that I had to look up the number.

We're missing some data. We don't have any locations from Oct 6th through Dec 20th, so we don't know when she moved down, but from at least the 20th of December to th 19th of January, she was along the coast 50 mi. (80 km) southeast of Cayenne and 10 miles west of Brazil's northernmost state of Amapa.

14 November:

This map begins on 1 October. At that time, Artoo (juvenile tagged in 2013) was moving around a bit, but basically settled down (he'll come back next spring), Snowy (MVY bird from 2011) had returned to her winter range from 2011-2012, Woody was back west of Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, Clyde (2014 young from Long Island) seems to have settled down on the eastern shores of the Gulf of Venezuela, and Bridget is showing all signs that she thinks Vero Beach, FL, is a good place to spend the next 18 months.

Flow (2014 juvenile from Essex, MA) hadn't really started migrating with any conviction yet and was still up around Chesapeake Bay, North Fork Bob (always a late starter in the fall) was in western Cuba, Belle (tagged as a juvenile on Martha's Vineyard in 2010), Charlie (Fishers Island adult male tagged in 2014), and Ron (adult male tagged in Washington, DC in 2013) were all within about 80 miles of each other in southeastern Cuba.

By 14 November, it seems almost everyone has settled down for the winter. North Fork Bob did his usual thing of stopping for a while in the flooded grasslands (llanos) of central Venezuela. He's now moving up into the highlands of the Guiana Shield, where he has spent all his previous winters along the Ventuari River. His radio missed a few transmissions, so I won't be surprised if we lose track of him like we did last year with his 2010 Classmate Sr. Bones. The youngsters (Bridget, Flow, and Clyde) may move again, but I'd be very surprised if they make any major moves south.