Catching up... Late 2012 to mid October 2013

It has been quite a while since anything has been posted to this blog.  We hope this will change in the coming months as we track five sooty falcons fitted with satellite-received transmitters (PTTs).  However, first we have to catch up with what has happened over the past year...

In late 2012 Lily Arison, who is the director of the Peregrine Fund Madagascar Program won a Conservation of Migratory Species (CMS) grant to undertake work on sooty falcons.  That work aims to promote a partnership between Oman and Madagascar, do field work, do community conservation work and fit a sooty falcon in Madagascar with a PTT.

In December 2012, Waheed Al Fazari, Mansoor Al Jahdhami, Lily Arison, and Mike McGrady all attended the CMS meeting on the Raptors MOU in Abu Dhabi, UAE.  This not only gave us a chance to meet each other, but allowed us to speak to other researchers and conservationists in the Range States.  In the months since that meeting CMS has embarked on writing an International Single Species Action Plan (ISSAP), an effort being lead by Dr. Umberto Gallo-Orsi.

During the late winter, Lily was able to conduct some surveys for sooty falcons in Madagascar, and found concentrations of them in the SW, Central, and NW parts of the island.  We hope that future, more systematic, efforts will help us understand their non-breeding time distribution.

In Oman we conducted our seventh year of research on breeding sooty falcons.  We are only just finished with that work so have not got all the data summarized.  Generally speaking occupancy seems to be down in this year.  Productivity per nest appears to have remained about the same, but obviously with fewer occupied territories, fewer fledglings were produced in Oman.  As in all previous years, our work would not have been nearly  as successful without the help of Sayid Al Sayabi.

Nestling sooty  falcons sitting on a "reader" that allows us to identify ringed adults electronically.

We also continued trapping adults and marking them on the breeding grounds.  Our marking efforts in previous years are paying off.  In this year I think we trapped 18 sooty falcons, 15 of which were marked by us previously.  Such data can be used to estimate population size, survival and fidelity to the breeding sites.

Mansoor (right) with previously ringed adult sooty falcon.

As mentioned above we also fitted five nestlings with satellite transmitters.  At the time of writing this blog post they have been out on the birds for about 10 days and all seem to be doing fine.  As expected none have moved from Fahal as of yet.  This time is quite important to the birds and lets hope that they survive and start their migration soon. Keep visiting this blog for updates of their movements.  To make it easier you may want to become a "Follower" by submitting your email address in the box in the upper right corner of this blog or clicking on the "Join this Site" button.  You may recall that we tracked sooty falcons in 2010.  Visit the blog that shows what they did, to remind you of that work.

Locations of sooty falcons over Fahal Island, up to 14 October 2013.

 A highlight of the breeding season was the visit by Lily and his colleague at the Peregrine Fund, Gilbert Razafimanjato, to Oman in October.  It was the first time that either Lily or Gilbert had seen nestling sooty falcons.  They helped with the nestling phase of the field work, helped fit satellite tags to birds and were able to visit other places in Oman where they added to their life-list of birds they have seen.  Lily and Mansoor gave a joint talk on sooty falcons and the work by the Peregrine Fund in Madagascar sponsored by the Office for Conservation of the Environment (OCE) and the Environment Society of Oman (ESO).  Waheed gave a 10-min interview on Oman television, and Mansoor gave a two-hour(!) interview on radio about the work.

Lily Arison, Azan Al Sayabi, and Abdulmajeed Al Daarmaki, Deputy Director General at OCE

Lily, Gilbert, Qes Al Ruwayhi, and Hitham Al Ruwayhi fitting a satellite transmitter to a sooty falcon.

 I think that now catches us up on things that have happened, and in the future our blog posts will likely be shorter.  We will be posting to the blog every so often (twice a month?), so return to this site to see what is happening.