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	8 Nov 2008. Travels so far-(with cumulative mileage)- Mittark is finally on migration. He left the Vineyard around 10:00 on the morning of the 6th. Winds were strongly out of the north at the time, so he went with the flow.      We don't know exactly when he hit the Florida coast, but it was probably a bit after midnight or in the early hours of the 8th, after 35 hours of non-stop flight.      I'll fill in the details later, but Mittark did the normal Cuba to Hispaniola trek and on the 20th headed south around 13:00. Nest stop should have been Venezuela or Colombia, across about 400 miles of the Caribbean. However, five or six hours later he landed on a boat. The next morning he was heading back to Hispaniola, where he is now. We have had birds disappear after landing on boats, but this time everything  seems OK. His speed heading back to Hispaniola was flight speed for a flying Osprey, not a fishing boat heading back to port.      We will try to track down weather data to see if he was running into a storm when he reversed engines and retreated to Hispaniola.      Luke did the same thing last year (I don't know if a boat was involved or not). We have not had good luck with Ospreys wintering on Hispaniola (2 out of 2 were shot), so this makes me more than a bit nervous. Details chronologically below:
	8 August 2008. Mittark is getting around! He is one of four young fledged this year by this remarkable pair of Ospreys--the most productive on Martha's Vineyard over the past 11 years. The cluster of points along the north shore indicates that our boy is hunting James Pond, a favorite Osprey fishing hole.      Given that Mittark has to compete with three siblings for handouts from Mom and Dad, it's not surprising that he's off on his own.
	6-13 Aug 08. Mittark continues to explore the Vineyard. After his first visits up to James Pond, where he may have met another bird with a transmitter (Meadow was also fishing here), he's been to Tisbury Great Pond on the south shore and Hart Haven in Oak Bluffs. (Yellow doughnuts are Osprey nests active in 2008.)

	13-19 Aug 08. Mittark made a couple of mini-road trips this week. On the 14th he flew across the Sound to Nashawena and Naushon Islands. On the 16th he flew over to "America", as the mainland in known on Martha's Vineyard. He wound up on the west fork of the Westport River, where there is a thriving colony of some 70 pairs of Ospreys. The whole trip took about 9 hours. He almost certainly has some distant cousins nesting on the Westport.      As the southern New England Ospreys were recovering from DDT back in the early 70s, the Vineyard population was reproducing remarkably well. Some of the young fledged on the Island probably helped bolster the Westport colony, which recovered more slowly than the Vineyard. And the relationship was probably reciprocal. In the mid 70s a color banded bird, probably from from the Westport colony nested on the Vineyard.
	19-25 Aug 08. Mittark must have found the Westport Osprey community beneath his standards. He's sticking to the Vineyard and Elizabeth Islands.      He has discovered Homer's favorite fishing holes at Crocker and Priester Pond.
	29 Aug-12 Sep 08. Mittark made another road trip. This was a 2-day affair. He checked out Cape Cod, leaving the Vineyard just after 11:00 on the 8th and returning the same time on the 10th.
	29 Aug-12 Sep 08. This is the same time period, but focused on his movement on the Vineyard. He spent a fair amount of time around a little cove off of Menemsha Pond, only a mile or so from his nest. He worked a tiny little pond along North Road and continued to fish Homer's favorite ponds further up North Rd. He also worked the north end of Tisbury Great Pond quite a bit.      There's a curious concentration of fixes just east of Menemsha Pond. There's no water here, so I don't know why he spent so much time here. We also had quite a few fixes for Homer in this same area. I think it may be elevated, so maybe they just like the view!
	12 -24 Sep 08. Most of this time he commuted back and forth between Crocker and Tisbury Great Pond. I left the lines connecting his locations off this map because there were so many of them between the two ponds that one couldn't see any of the terrain.      The eastern-most point here is very close to Penelope's nest. At this time, she was down catching fish on a little river in Surniame.
	24 Sep-6 Oct 08. These are his last two weeks on the Island. Most of his time was spent fishing around Tisbury Great Pond and much of that along Long Cove.      On October 6th he pushed off due south over the Atlantic, setting us up for another cliff hanger.
	6-8 Oct 08. Looking south, we see another gutsy move by a juvenile Osprey. (Of course, it wasn't really gutsy, because he had no idea what lay ahead of him--he was just following an instinctive urge to fly south.)      Mittark was out over the Atlantic in non-stop flight for about 35 hours.      He covered over 1,150 mi. (1,850 km) before making landfall in Florida north of Palm Beach.
	7 Oct 08      These were the windstreams that Mittark experienced on the 7th. They were pretty similar on the 6th. It's obvious why he headed due south when he left the Vineyard.      This also explains why he was able to average 31 mph (50 kph), covering 1051 mi. (1691 km) in 34 hours. Penelope averaged only 20 mph on her trip across this side of the Atlantic.
	7 Oct 08      After resting up for half the night (he made landfall near Port St. Lucie around midnight), Mittark headed south just before noon. By mid-afternoon he was in an extension of the Everglades west of Boca Raton, where he settled down for the rest of the day.      Next stop should be Cuba, but if we've learned anything following these young Ospreys, it's that anything's possible. never knows

	8-10 Oct 08     Our bird spent the night of the 9th at a construction site in a residential neighborhood in Miami before continuing due south, over the Keys and on to Cuba.
	11-12 Oct 08      Looking southeast down the length of Cuba, we see that after roosting in the coastal mangroves on Cuba's north shore, Mittark headed south at first, but turned east and hit the southern coast at the end of the day.
	12-15 Oct 08      Just to confuse you, we're looking north  here, rather than the over-the-shoulder point of view from previous maps.      Mittark wasted no time in crossing Cuba. He spent the night of the 15th on the eastern tip of the island, with 1,974 mi (3,177 km) under his belt. He's 10 days into migration without a day's rest and has averaged 197 mi (318 km)/day.
	15-17 Oct 08      Back to looking southeast, here we see Mittark leaving Cuba and heading south. A couple of hours into his flight he turned east and made landfall in northwestern Haiti, on the island of Hispaniola. Perhaps he could see land when he made the turn.
	16-20 Oct 08      Mittark kept right on moving across Hispaniola. When he ran out of land on the eastern tip of Hispaniola he headed south, bound for Venezuela.      About 4 hours into his trip he landed on a boat headed south. The last three points on the map before the last signal on the 19th were too close together to be from a flying Osprey (he would have gone much further under his own power).      Sometime the next day he was flying back to the Dominican Republic.      He may have run into bad weather, or someone on the boat may have convinced him that the D.R. is a better place to spend the winter than Venezuela. This, we have learned, is not the case. Both Ospreys (Moshup and Luke) that tried to overwinter there were shot.
	20 Oct-8 Nov 08      Mittark has settled down on the northern outskirts of Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic.
	20 Oct-8 Nov 08      Mittark has been fishing a very little river (big creek?) for almost three weeks.

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