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	Travels so far. 13 Nov 08. Penelope was our first bird to make it to South America this year. It took her only 13 days to cover a little over 2,700 mi. (4,400 km). She did not take a single day off, which is unusual. She seems to have had perfect weather the whole way down. She left Massachusetts on the 9th, passed over North Carolina's Outer Banks on the 13th, and arrived in the Bahamas 26.5 hours later. On the 19th she was flying south from the Dominican Republic, heading out over 490 mi. (790 km) of the Caribbean Sea. She landed on Islas de Aves-- Islands of the Birds--east of Bonaire on the 20th. She made landfall in Venezuela on the 21st and kept right on moving southeast. On the 29th she was in Suriname. After settling down for a week in south-central French Guiana, Penelope made a big loop, east, south, and then back northwest to French Guiana. On October 29th she was on the Atlantic coast and a day later on the north bank of the Amazon River in Brazil. From there she returned to the river she was fishing in French Guiana. Trip details below, chronologically.
	8 August 08. Penelope's first week of wandering with her new GPS transmitter. The little yellow donuts are other active Osprey nests in the area. The great ponds on the Vineyard's south shore are ideal fishing holes for Osprey--lots of fish and relatively shallow water.
	5-12 Aug 08. Penelope has made one trip to the north end of the Island. At the uppermost point on this map she was heading NW, so she was probably going to the Lagoon. This is a good lesson in interpreting satellite data and connecting points with lines. Each point just tells us where the bird was at that moment. The lines imply that the birds flew directly from one point to the next on the map, which may or may not be the case. On this map, her direction at that northernmost point tells us that she prior to that GPS fix, she was southeast of that point, maybe Edgartown Great Pond, and was heading to the Lagoon or even the north shore when her GPS recorded her location, speed, and direction. Some of my colleagues won't connect the points on their maps with lines. I do it to keep the sequence of points clear and remind myself to interpret the lines carefully.

	13-20 Aug 08. Nothing much going on here. Penelope is staying pretty close to home. She's making forays out to the north shore, but only in one case did she spend much more than an hour in the area before heading back to home base.
	20-27 Aug 08. Penelope is this year's wallflower. We saw similar behavior with Tasha back in '04. Tasha explored so little that I was concerned she wouldn't start migrating. In fact, when she did start she made it to Hispaniola in 15 days--the first of her cohort to get through Cuba.
	9 Sep 08. Sometime around 10:00, the instinctive urge to migrate surpassed any other urges on her mind, so Penelope packed her bags and headed west. Naturally she passed through the Westport River Osprey colony before heading across Narragansett Bay and passing into Connecticut, where she spent the night at a couple of small ponds just across the RI border.
	9 Sep 08. She roosted by a couple of ponds in Pawcatuck, CT. Nice place to grab a fish before heading off on the next leg of the journey.
	10 Sep 08. (Looking south now) Penelope took off probably before 08:00, passed right over Gardiners Island, once home to the densest known colony of Ospreys, heading southwest on a course that would have taken her to North Carolina's Outer Banks. Sometime around 14:00 she turned west (right in this south-facing view) and made landfall in Maryland just after 17:00. She settled down at a couple of small ponds near Germantown, MD, just north of Chincoteague Bay.
	10 Sep 08. Her roost on the 10th in eastern Maryland.
	10-13 Sep 08. After her unusual junket out over the ocean which bypassed New York and New Jersey, Penelope headed down the DelMarVa Peninsula, crossed the mouth of Chesapeake Bay in the afternoon of the 11th, and settled down to roost in North Carolina. She moved just about 80 mi. (125 km) southwest during the 12th and then headed south on the next leg of her migration. She took off just before 09:00, passed over Bald Head Island Island around 11:30, and then headed out over the Atlantic. Most of the birds we've seen come down the east coast pass right over Bald Head and wind up down in Florida somewhere. It looks like Penelope will hit the Bahamas. The last point on the map was at 20:00 on the 13th.

11 & 12 Sep 08 Roosts
On the 11th, she was on the north shore of Albemarle Sound. On the 12th, she was on Broad Creek, which feeds into Pamlico Sound.

13-16 Sep 08
On the 13th, she passed over Bald Head Island just before noon. Her initial course would have taken her over 1,000 mi (1,600 km) to Hispaniola. Around 18:00 or so, she turned a bit to the west and was heading about due south for 3 hours. At that point her GPS turned off, so we don't know when she made the correction in course that got her to the northernmost of the Bahamas--Little Abaco Island.
She was out over the Atlantic for just over 25 hours, covering 565 mi. (909 km), at an average speed of 22 mph (35 kph). This is about the slowest speed I can remember for a bird over the water.

14-16 Sep 08
After resting up on the evening of the 14th, Penelope continued island hopping southeast through the Bahamas. She moved 192 mi. (209 km) on the 15th and 160 mi (203 km) on the 16th.
She spent the night on the very last bit of land in the Bahamas on Acklins Island.
Next on the horizon are Turks and Caicos Islands, and then Hispaniola.

14 and 16 Sep Roosts Penelope arrived in the Bahamas around noon and must have helped herself to a fish or two in the bay between Grand Bahama Island and the Abaco Islands.
Her roost on the 16th was at the very tip of the Bahamas.

	17-18 Sep Penelope left the southernmost island in the Bahamas (Acklins) around noon on the 17th and spent the next night on Great Inagua Island. I put Luke's path from '07 on this map. This was where Luke finished his marathon, 50+ hour crossing of the western Atlantic last November. Penelope hopped down to Hispaniola, only 70 mi. (110 km) southeast and made it into the Dominican Republic before roosting on the 18th.
	17-19 Sep Penelope blew through Hispaniola in 29 hours. This is a bird on a mission. She got a pretty late start for her Caribbean crossing, leaving the D.R. right around 17:00 on the 19th. About 25 hours later, she alit on a tiny island just east of Bonaire.
	19-22 Sep The indefatigable Penelope arrived and spent the night, appropriately enough, on the Islas de Aves (Island of Birds!) around 25 hrs after leaving Hispaniola in the afternoon of the 20th. Shortly after 08:00 (a couple of hours after sunrise) she took off over open water again, with Venezuela just 97 mi. (105 km) away. She arrived on the South American coast just after noon and climbed the coastal mountains, which lurch up out of the Caribbean along Venezuela's northern shore. She carried on another 3 hours before settling down in a river valley for the evening of the 21st. She knocked off another 129 mil (206 km) on the 22nd. 2,877 mi. (4,630 km) on the Osprey-ometer so far in 14 days.
	21 Sep Penelope arrived on the Venezuelan coast about 8 miles east of Caracas' airport at Maiquetia. She probably worked her way up the valley below the orange line, and crossed the mountain ridge at 13:00.
	23-29 Sep In our last overview map we had Penelope roosting on the 22nd after her first full day in Venezuela. Over the next 6 days she covered 656 mi. (1056 km), bringing the total migration distance to 3,527 mi (5,676 km) in 20 days. This is about the average distance our adults migrated. On the 23rd she stopped on the north bank of the Orinoco River. The blue lines left of her points are the tracks one of our first adults (HX) took to his wintering area on the delta of the Orinoco. On the 24th Penelope only moved about 60 mi. and spent the night in the delta region. She pushed on into Guyana (formerly British Guiana) on the 25th and then kept on going for the next 3 days. She roosted on the 28th in Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana). This would be a pretty safe spot for her to stop and spend the winter. This is about as unihabited (by our species) a spot as you can find on the planet.
	28 Sept-12 Oct It looks like Penelope may have settled down. She is on a small river running through hilly rainforest about 40 mi (63 km) into Suriname. She arrived here on the 28th of September and has been moving up and down about 2 mi (3.2 km) of the river for two weeks. If this really is the end of her migration, we sure don't have to worry about fish farms around here!

	12 Oct-12 Nov. One of these days I'll stop making predictions about what our birds will do next. Penelope left her base in Suriname on 13 Oct, heading southeast. She was tempted by a spot on the 15th, but made a short junket due east, returning that day to her roost from the night before. On a small scale, this is the behavior we see when a bird is settling down. She kept moving southeast on the 17th, and after a couple of nights on the French Guianan border, she moved into Brazil on the 21st, reversing direction, returning to a new spot in French Guiana on the 22nd. She spent a week on a small river (hidden under cloud cover in this Google image) in southern French Guiana. On the 28th she flew due east into the Brazilian state of Amapa. On the 29th she was on the Atlantic coast and the next day on the banks of the Amazon River. She then turned around and headed back to French Guiana. On 5 Nov she returned to the river where she must have found good fishing about a week before. This loop covered 607 mi (977 km) and fits a pattern we've seen in a number of juvenile Ospreys--they find a good spot, settle down for a while, and then make exploratory trips into the surrounding countryside, navigating back to a spot that has proven fruitful (fishful?).
	13-31 Nov 08 Penelope finally seems to have settled down here in the middle of southern French Guiana. She is working up and down a 35 miles (55 km) stretch of a small river deep in undisturbed rainforest. Unfortunately, there was fairly heavy cloud cover here when the photos that Google Earth is using were taken, so we can't discern much detail. I contacted my colleage Jean-Marc Thiollay, a world renowned raptor biologist to ask him about this part of French Guiana. Jean-Marc worked for many years deep in the heart of French Guiana, which is a d�partement of France (roughly equivalent to a county in the US). His insights accompany the next map.
	1-31 Dec 08 Jean-Marc Thiollay e-mailed the following: The stopover site of your Osprey (Penelope) in Southern French Guiana is interesting. The species is abundant in winter months in that country, but most birds are concentrated along the (northern) coast which is mostly marshes, estuaries, mangroves and mudflats. Nevertheless, some birds (few) are regularly seen on the rivers of the interior, but fewer and fewer as one goes southward. Your bird is in the central part of the 3-million hectares [7.5 million acres] National Park that covers most of the southern Guiana and is entirely covered with primary rain forest. Your bird is far from even the smallest human settlement. Of course, fish are plentiful but there are also many natural resident fish predators (from birds to mammals, reptiles, etc.), which may compete with overwintering Ospreys. Rivers are often loaded by sediments but the October-December period has indeed the lowest rainfall and hence the clearest waters.

	1-31 Jan 09. Link to 2009 maps.

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