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.