Caley

'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
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	Travels so far: 19 Sep-2 Dec 09. Caley jumped on the "sure I can fly 1,200 miles non-stop" bandwagon and flew directly (more or less) from Martha's Vineyard to the Bahamas.      She spent a nerve-wracking (for us, not her) two months in the Dominican Republic, just a few miles from where Meadow was shot last year. We were nervous because we have never had an Osprey successfully overwinter in the D.R.      Much to my surprise (and relief), after 2 months in the D.R. she packed her bags and crossed the Caribbean. She is now in Venezuela.      Nothing but surprises from this bird. After a short rest in northern Venezuela, she went back into full migration mode and is now in Guyana.      Something happened to her (or she dropped her transmitter--an unlikely event) in early December, when the transmitter stopped sending signals. We still occasionally get a very weak signal, but it's most likely that she died somehow. Scroll down for details of her trip. Or jump to: Migration begins 29 Sep - Stopover in the D.R. 17 Nov. Across Venezuela. New and final maps. 1-11 Dec.
	3-8 Aug 09. Caley was tagged on the 3rd at the mouth of Caleb's Pond on Chappaquiddick Island. "Chappy" is the unofficial Osprey headquarters of Martha's Vineyard. 12-14 pairs typically nest each year. The Caleb's Pond area seems to be developing into a mini-colony. Two pairs nested this year, and two housekeeping pairs built substantial nests but did not lay eggs.      These are her hourly locations through the 8th. She and her family like to sit on sailboat masts moored near the nest.
	8-25 Aug 09. Caley and Moffet (our Felix Neck Sanctuary bird) are the first two young to really start to explore. They may have bumped into  a couple of times. Wonder if they compare notes on their transmitters. She likes the coves of Edgartown Great Pond.
	25 Aug-7 Sep 09. Bea and Caley are vying for the Couch-Potato-of-the-year award. The human residents of "Chappy" are notoriously loathe to leave their small island, but I didn't know the affliction crossed species lines. These are all the locations for over 2 weeks. Caley has ventured afield some, but Bea really never has.      It's quite unusual to have these two birds staying so close to their nests when one of their "classmates" is already in the Bahamas, Hix is in Maine, and Buck is hundreds of miles and 5 state lines from his nest.      Every year brings its surprise.
	19-21 Sep 09. Caley crossed our corner of the Atlantic in about 45 hours.      There seem to have been a couple of course corrections in her path.      Over the night of the 19th and early morning hours of the 20th she was heading southwest, presumably riding a northeast wind.      When we pick up her track again on the morning of the 20th, she's heading pretty much due south.      Until we track down some archival meteorological data, we can only speculate that she's been heading due south the whole time and at this point the northeast winds have abated, so she's not drifting with the wind. Alternatively, she may have made a course correction sometime during the evening, or perhaps at dawn when the sun came up. (Birds do reset their internal compasses by sunrise and sunset positions).      This is a good point to re-emphasize that the straight line from the last point on the 19th to the 1st on the 20th does not mean that that was exactly the track she took.      She made another course correction at 17:00 on the 20th. Presumably at that point she could actually see the Bahamas.      She covered 1290 miles (2076 km) in 45 hours, averaging 29 mph (46 kph).
	21-23 Sep 09. Caley stayed over land for two days, following Little San Salvador and Long Islands, which conveniently point in the direction she wants to go.
	23-26 Sep 09. Caley took a bee line (couldn't resist) from Long Island to eastern Cuba, where she roosted close to shore.     She made a modest move east on the 25th and then flew over to Haiti on the 26th.
	25 Sep-9 Oct 09. Caley kept right on moving from Cuba across Hispaniola.      We had hoped she would continue on to South America, but she decided this was far enough and settled down.      So far, we have lost all four of the juvenile Ospreys that tried to overwinter in the D.R. We know three were shot and we suspect the 4th was as well.
	29 Sep-10 Oct 09. Caley is spending most of her time fishing two rivers in the eastern Dominican Republic. She is fishing mostly along a small river just a few miles west of and nerve-wrackingly close to the farm where Meadow was shot early in 2009.      After what appeared to be the end of her migration, she had covered 2,083 miles (3,352 km) in 10 days for an average of 208 miles/day (335 km/day).
	10-18 Oct 09. Caley is commuting between two rivers, keeping us a little bit happy by not wandering over towards Higuey.
	18-25 Oct 09. Caley made one foray towards Higuey, but continued to hang around the two rivers that she has been fishing pretty much since her arrival on 29 Sep.      I've put Meadow's locations for her last 11 days on the map for comparison. Both birds used the river close to Higuey. In this landscape, it's pretty much rivers or farm ponds, as there are no large inland reservoirs like those that dot the northern Venezuelan landscape (see Claw's maps for '08).
	25 Oct-8 Nov 09. Caley seems to have made a choice on her favorite river. Looks like she's settled down. But, if we've learned anything over the years, it's that looks can be deceiving.   Scroll on!
	25 Oct 09. Caley flew due south on the 9th, perhaps an aborted restart to her migration, but returned to her base of operations on her favorite river.      On the 10th, she was off on the next leg of her migration just before 09:00. She left the D.R. behind (hooray!) around 13:15 and headed southeast.
	9-11 Nov 09. About 6 hours into her trip, Caley apparently caught up with a boat heading in her direction and hitched a ride. She's not a fast Osprey, averaging about 20 mph in open flight. The distance between the last two fixes for the day were only 10 miles apart. This is really too slow for an Osprey on the wing.      This is another example of the care we need to take in interpreting the lines between points separated by more than an hour. We don't know exactly where Caley flew overnight from the last fix on the 10th to the first location on the morning of the 11th. Certainly, she didn't make a sharp right at 08:00, so she must have been coming in from a bit further north.
	10-13 Nov 09. More evidence that Caley was hitchhiking at some point on the 10th. The distance between her last fix on the 10th and the first on the 11th (12 hours apart) was only 112 mi. (182 km) for an average speed of 10 mph (16 kph). Over the next two 12-hour segments (when she was certainly flying) she covered 195 mi. (315 km) and 191 mi. (302 km) averaging a pretty slow 15 mph (25 kph), but 50% faster than the overnight segment on the 10th. I don't think an Osprey could fly 10 mph and stay in the air.      An alternative explanation would be that she was bucking a very strong headwind, but that's pretty unlikely in this area where the tradewinds are so reliably out of the northeast.      The whole crossing was at least 600 mi. (960 km). She made landfall in Venezuela in the mid morning of the 12th, about 43 hours leaving the D.R.      Despite all that time in the air, she didn't stop to rest more than a few hours. She pushed right on moving south about 30 mi. (52 km) into Venezuela's coastal mountains.
	19 Sep-17 Nov 09. The trip so far.
	12-17 Nov 09. Caley hunkered down for a couple of nights after her crossing of the Caribbean. On the 14th she moved east and found another mountain river valley to hunt for a few days.
	14-17 Nov 09. Caley has found another river to her liking.      I don't think this is the end of her travels. Homer, back in '06 didn't find a spot he liked until January.      Migration stats: 57 days since leaving home. 14 days actually migrating. 2787 miles total this migration (so far)= 4485 km. On migration days only, she averaged 199 miles/day=320 k/day. Stay tuned!
	17 Nov-2 Dec 09. I didn't think we'd seen the end of Caley's migration! She fired up the migration engines and blasted through northern Venezuela in 5 days. She's now on the Essequibo River in Guyana, more or less following in the footsteps (wingbeats?) of Penelope, our '08 Vineyard bird that's spending her year and a half in French Guiana.
	24 Nov 09.  Caley spent the night of the 24th at the Camatagua Reservoir in north-central Venezuela. This was a reservoir that our Delaware bird, Claws, spent a lot of time at. His locations over the '08-'09 seasons are here in blue. Caley, apparently, was not as impressed with the fishing here as Claws was. Maybe the fishy side of the reservoir is over on the eastern side.
	14 Nov-2 Dec 09. We're looking a little south of east in this map--sort of looking way over Caley's shoulder as she logged another 771 miles (1,240 km) of migration. That brings her total to 3,557 mi (5,726 km).      On this 8-day trip, she stopped at reservoirs for the first two nights, and then at rivers for the rest of the way.
	30 Nov-2 Dec 09. Caley has settled down, at least for a few days, on one of the main rivers flowing north through Guyana (formerly British Guiana).      It looks like she may stay here. It certainly looks like good Osprey habitat, and as of the 6th of Dec. she's still at this spot.
	1-7 Dec 09. Caley settled down for a while, made a quick daytrip south downriver about 11 mile (18 km), and then headed back downriver to the cluster of point in the middle of this map.
	1-7 Dec 09. After the short junket downriver on the 5th, Caley settled down along this braided river in central Guyana. It seemed like we could relax and not worry about Caley. Once she left the Dominican Republic, we thought she had a really good chance to make it. Sadly, we were disappointed.
	7-11 Dec 09. The last signals we received from Caley's transmitter were on the 7th and then 11th of December. This 4-day gap between the last two days is strange. We hate to point to shooting as the explanation of every bird we lose, but this sort of gap is suggestive.      This certainly looks like a spot where she wouldn't have encountered humans, but there really is no place in all of South America where Ospreys are going to be totally safe from shooting.

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