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