More birds tagged

This year we have fitted 5 more satellite transmitters to sooty falcons, 4 adults and one juvenile.  Right now they are all near their nesting places as we are right in the middle of the fledging period, with some young birds flying and others set to take off in the next days.  Below is a picture of the juvenile bird.  Its mother also has a transmitter.

Juvenile sooty falcon with satellite transmitter, alphanumeric and microchip rings

These birds will likely not leave for their wintering grounds until November or so.  While we are waiting, we'll try to give you some information so you can better understand the birds and the maps you will see.  Below is a map of the movements of the five birds.  As you can see they cluster around the islands, but they also seem to move around a bit.  One bird seems to have made at least one visit to the mainland.  This is not unlikely because that bird is an adult female,and her three young are hungry and flying.  So, she might be ranging wider in search of food.

Also, you will notice that the spread of locations is greater east to west than north to south.  That is an artifact of the satellites that track these birds.  These are not gps tags because gps tags would be too heavy for the falcons. These 12 g tags use the Argos satellite system, and those satellites orbit over the poles.  This means that the potential for inaccuracy is greater in the east to west direction than the north to south.

Locations of sooty falcons fitted with satellite transmitters.

The breeding season

We're giving you a break from the usual set of maps. That's because the maps that we have from the last month really don't show very much. Ivato, the falcon fitted with a transmitter in Madagascar last February, has stayed on a small island in Eritrea (look at earlier blog posts if you missed that bit of news). The four breeding birds we fit with satellite transmitters in Oman in August appear to be doing just fine.  They are probably busy raising chicks right now, so we really don't expect them to move very far until November or December.  Below is a picture of a sooty falcon with  a transmitter in August

Fitting a sooty falcon with a satellite transmitter

We will be commencing our next round of field work in about 10 days, then in October we will be surveying Musandam for breeding falcons.  On the face of it Musandam looks very promising, but no one has reported many sooty falcons there.  We don't know whether that lack of records is a result of little effort or low numbers of falcons.  I guess we'll have a better idea by the end of October.  

Some Good News and Some Bad News

First the good news...

Since our last post (which was over a month ago !... we have been busy in the field!), a lot has happened.

Ivato, the bird we marked in Madagascar last February has seemed to settle on a small island in Eritrea.  If you look back over the last months, he has made a number of trips from that island to the mainland, but in the last month he has stayed put...more or less.  Below is a map of his movements over the last 20 days.  We still don't know whether Ivato was a breeder this year. The time he spent away from the breeding are seems to suggest that he was not breeding.

Ivato's movements during August 2014.

The other good news is that we completed another egg-stage bout of field work on the breeding grounds in Oman.  During that work we managed to capture a number of falcons, some of which we have caught before.  One bird we have captured every year since 2008, and at that time she was an adult, so she must be at least 9 yrs old. We also captured a bird that we ringed as a chick in 2007, so that one is at least 7.  During our field work we also fitted four adult birds with satellite transmitters, and they are all apparently doing well.

Abdulrahman and Mansoor with a transmittered sooty falcon.

 They are all busy taking care of chicks we think, so they have not moved far from their breeding places.  They'll start to move, most likely in November.  Below is a map of their movements since they were fitted with tags. We'll be commencing our nestling stage work in about 3 weeks, and we will report on those activities in due course.  Keep visiting the blog.

Satellite tracking of four adult sooty falcons during August 2014.

Now for the bad news...  Sadly, around the 1 August, the sooty falcon that we have been tracking since last year died.  Just a few days before dying the bird returned to Oman, flew to UAE and then returned again to a place near Yibal.  We were able to use the satellite locations to go into the desert and find it. What we found did not give us much of a clue as to why it died.  By the time we retrieved the bird, the carcass was quite dried out, and we could not see any obvious injuries, nor could we see if it was thin.  We found it in a shallow wadi very far from humans near a Prosopis (Ghaf) tree, and it was half buried by drifting sand.  Below is a map of where the bird was finally located.  Although we say this is bad news, really it is more sad than bad news.  Mortality in this species may be naturally high, especially during the first year, and in most cases we never retrieve the bird (or the transmitter).  In this case we can confirm 100% that the bird died, and we will be able to fit the tag to another sooty falcon this autumn.

The red dot is where we found 130393