Welcome to the start of the 2009 fall peregrine migration.
The first of our two remaining satellite-tagged adult peregrines, Island Girl, has just started her movement south from the Arctic. We expect to be following her back to South America over the next several weeks.
We expect the other falcon, Sparrow King, to start heading head south sometime during the next two weeks.
This is the third year of the Southern Cross Peregrine Project and we hope that you will join us "live" for another amazing journey to the southern hemisphere. We encourage everyone to follow along online and to
write in your comments by e-mail. They are always appreciated. We have heard from people in over 20 countries so far and would like to hear from more of you.
If all goes well, this will be Sparrow King's third migration and Island Girl's first traverse of the two continents with satellite transmitters attached.
Please keep in mind that this an immense migration spanning over 9,000 miles in some cases and lasting up to three months. It is not easy for the peregrines. In actuality, it is both expensive energetically and quite dangerous individually as we have seen with Linda, Paco and Fireball. Mortality can occur from a variety of causes, such as being struck by vehicles or captured and killed by ground predators.
In addition, we are finding that many of the transmitters fail after a
year.
You can also check out comments from the Southern Cross team (Don, Mark, Bud and others) on our
daily blog. We'll try to update this each day.
So let's hope all goes well for our two arctic nesting peregrines, Sparrow
King and Island Girl and that they arrive safely back in Chile once again.
Have a good season!
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Summary of early 2009 events --
Team members Bud Anderson and Kathy Gunther traveled south to Chile for a three week expedition (24 February to 19 March) to trap and satellite tag four northern adult female peregrines. Third team member, Mark Prostor, was unable to join the team due to work constraints and we definitely missed having him along this year.
After arriving in Santiago and staying with our friends Christian Gonzalez, his wife Giannina and kids, Seba and Fran for a day of preparations, we
traveled far north to Tal Tal (a coastal town south of Antofagasta) to search for and hopefully recover the satellite transmitter from the adult male peregrine, Paco, who was lost last year during the spring migration.
On our route north, we found adult male peregrine #1 (28 February) perched on a cell tower at Bahia Inglesa. We captured and banded him but did not put on a transmitter. We have four units, all of them 30 gram transmitters designed for females only. They are too heavy, in our opinion, to place on a male. For males, we prefer a smaller 22 gram unit. This situation would prove to be an unexpected problem as the expedition continued on.
When we arrived at the site of Paco's last GPS signals (1 March), we searched extensively in the areas of his last GPS coordinates over a two day period, but unfortunately we were unable to locate the $3,800.00 unit. It simply was not where the last signals originated from. And so, the fate of this transmitter will remain a complete mystery.
From there we returned south to the La Serena area (3-7 March) in an attempt to re-trap the La Serena bird and remove her satellite transmitter. Although we saw her several times in her usual perch tree (often sitting near an adult male likely to be her mate), she refused to take the harness we gave her on several occasions over many days of trying. Based on her behavior, we strongly suspect that she remembers having been caught at this site two years ago. She exhibited what could only be described atypically as a tentative approach on each attempt. She would simply not close on it.
We also spent these three days in a second attempt to capture the cathedral bird in La Serena. Despite developing a new trapping technique on her tower perch, she evaded capture by her use of a variety of random perches on and near the tower. She would kill both early and late in the day and then perch in an Araucaria tree for the majority of the day. This is certainly one of the most challenging peregrine situations that I have ever encountered over many, many years of trapping. But we have not given up yet on either of these birds.
We were forced by our schedule to leave the northern area and traveled back to Santiago where we exchanged pigeons and picked up some more equipment (8 March).
The next day, we headed south to the coastal Putu dune area near Constitucion, arriving on 9 March at 1400. By 1700, We had trapped our second peregrine, just minutes from our old campsite. It was an immature tundra male, the first young peregrine we had seen over the last three seasons of working on this project. But, once again, it was a male and we could not tag him with the larger transmitters.
This is certainly one of the southernmost records of a juvenile tundra peregrine in Chile.
At Putu, we are very near to Elizabetha's area and we know from the satellite signals that she is here. We had hoped to see her but she did not show herself during our time there.
On 11 March, we trapped our third peregrine, another immature tundra male,. Great to see another immature bird this far south, but once again, it is a male and we were unable to tag him.
Our trapping was hampered by heavy coastal fog on some mornings and a strong SW wind coming off the ocean on most afternoons.
On 12 March, we left Putu and drove an hour or so south to another coastal area reported to have dunes. This location, near the town of Chanco, actually lacked good dunes as they have been "stabilized" by vegetation, but it did have an excellent broad, 15 mile long sand beach that we could drive with he ATV. Five minutes out and we caught our fourth peregrine, yet another adult male, sitting on a pole on the beach. We judged this peregrine to most likely be a local Chilean falcon of the
cassini race based on his plumage characters and small size. We banded and released him but, yet again, we could not tag him as we only had female transmitters.
That afternoon, we returned once again to Putu.
On 15 March, Kathy made the last morning run at Putu. We are seeing females but, for some unknown reason, they have been extremely difficult to approach this year. At 1100, Kathy succeeded in catching another adult male peregrine (#5). Five peregrines captured this season and all of them males, usually the hardest to catch. What are the odds?
But this bird was a bit different. He was found perching near an adult female peregrine that Kathy had captured and banded last year, "Island Girl". Both birds were hunting the pigeons together and were even seen sharing a kill. So this is likely one of the "winter pairs" that we find in so many Latin American countries. If so, we think it would be the southernmost record for this behavior among northern falcons.
After processing and releasing the male, Kathy went back out and caught her second peregrine in a day! , this time her old friend "Island Girl". We finally had a female peregrine that we could actually tag. And her territory here is exactly adjacent to Elizabetha, so we can not only compare their ranges in Chile but, if she flies north as we expect, we may be able to compare both their migrations and destinations. Great job by Kathy!
From there, we travelled to a large dune field north of Vina Del Mar, the Riviera of Chile. To our knowledge, no one had surveyed this area for peregrines before. Despite working these very different dunes for two days, we saw no peregrines there and on 18 March, we returned to Santiago for the flight home.
So we caught six peregrines, five of them males and tagged a single adult female from Putu.
Next year, we will exchange these 30 gram units for the new 20 gram transmitters so we can place them on peregrines of either sex.
We want to thank our many friends who helped us on our journey south, including Christian and Giannina, Felipe Camiroaga, Bob Lang, Manuel Enrique Rojas Martinez, Christian Silva Barrera, Carolin Schachermayer, Rosendo Silva, Orlando Aguilera, Paul
Paredes, Clayton White and of course, all of the FRG members who made this happen, including the two mainstays of the project, Mark Prostor and Don McCall. Also thanks to Laura Pizzaro for inspiration."
Overview of the 2008 Chilean-Arctic Northward Peregrine Migration:
In January 2008, the SCPP field team (Mark Prostor, Kathy Gunther and Bud Anderson) journeyed south to Chile for a three week
trapping effort beginning near the city of Puerto Montt at approximately 41 degrees, 30 minutes south latitude.
Our goal was to locate and satellite tag the southernmost known migrant tundra peregrines in the world.
The earlier SCCP field team, (Zach Smith and his wife Elizabeth, Mark Hopey and Kathy Gunther) had located several falcons
during their two-week survey in this region of Chile in December 2007 with advice from our Chilean team member, Christian Gonzalez, in Santiago.
Based on their observations, we began our search near Puerto Montt, approximately 900 km (570 miles) south of Santiago.
On his first day out on a beach with the bike, Mark managed to capture an adult female almost immediately. We called her “Chamiza”
in reference to the area where she was caught.
She turned out to be a most remarkable peregrine. Her plumage was unlike anything any of us had seen before (in the arctic, Padre Island
or South America) and we were completely puzzled about where she might be from. Her pale plumage, especially her head, was reminiscent
of a Pallid Falcon, the rare color morph from Patagonia, but the color was not quite right for there either. Her appearance is most similar
to the very pale bird discovered by Gordon Court at Rankin Inlet, AK. a number of years ago and shown in a photograph from Brian Wheeler’s book,
Raptors of Western North America (2003) on page 495.
We made the decision to go ahead and tag her to learn where she will go later in the year. Will she fly north to the arctic or
will she hang back and eventually head east over the Andes into Patagonia? We are all watching her signals very closely. Either way,
it will be remarkable to discover her geographic origins. Subsequent signals since January show that she is remaining in the Chamiza
region until now (March 2008).
Check out her satellite map and look at how she flew over the local volcano, Volcan Cabuco (2,015 m). Pretty spectacular. We have also learned that she
likes to vary her roosting location and seems to prefer sleeping in trees in the Andean foothills.
Next, we worked the area near Puerto Montt, eventually heading out to the Pacific coast where Mark nearly
caught an adult male tundra bird just north of the island of Chiloe (latitude 41 degrees, 40’ and 03” south).
He had a very good look at this bird at close range and considered it to be a classic tundra peregrine. So
we consider this to be the southernmost record for this migrant race.
From there, we traveled north, paralleling the Chile coastline, all the while looking for more falcons.
As Christian Gonzalez and our earlier survey team found out, it is very challenging trying to locate falcons
in this environment of extensive forests of Pine and Eucalyptus trees. Road access to the coast is limited,
open areas are sparse and access to many potential sites is difficult.
But we were able to finally find birds near Constitucion, a coastal town about 265 km (165 miles) south
of Santiago. This is an area of extensive coastal dunes situated adjacent to an enormous freshwater wetland
creating perfect habitat for tundra falcons. It is remarkably similar in many ways to Padre Island, Texas,
the coastal dune fields north of Veracruz, Mexico and the deserts of Peru and northern Chile.
During our week there, we captured an additional five adult peregrines. We judged three of these birds to
be definite tundra falcons, basing our opinion on their wing measurements, pale heads, gray backs and white
fronts. So we tagged and released them (Paco, Fireball and Elizabetha) back to the dunes.
The two other adult females (Island Girl and Dune), which we released untagged, only confirmed what we
learned last year in the northern deserts of Chile. Separating the two races of reddish-fronted peregrines here is difficult if not impossible in many cases. In hand, some of these southerly Chilean
cassini are indistinguishable from anatum-type adult peregrines. It is especially difficult to separate them when the birds are molting flight feathers and wing measurements become useless. So rather than tagging them with expensive satellite transmitters only to have these two falcons possibly remain in Chile, we decided to let them go back into the wild banded but untagged.
Analysis of their DNA in the future should clarify their geographic origins and prove us right or wrong
in our decision to release them.
In the meantime, the four new GPS-enabled satellite transmitters have just shifted to the northbound migration
regime of two signals per day, one generated near midnight and the other in the afternoon. We expect the
birds to begin migrating sometime in the first two weeks of April and invite you all to join us as we
hopefully discover their routes, timing and breeding areas.
So far, we have found that the new birds have remarkably small ranges centering primarily on the coastal
dune system. It appears that the two males are literally sleeping among the dunes, while Elizabetha seems to prefer to sleep in different pine trees on the forested ridge well back from the coast.
Additionally this season, we’ll be watching both Sparrow King and Seven to see how their migration this
season compares with their movements from last year. Will they leave at the same time as last April? Will
they take the same general routes north? Will they use any of the same roosting sites for sleeping? And
will they return to the same eyries (nest sites) in the north at about the same time as last year?
Finally, as the transmitter signals for the three resident Chilean peregrines (Houdini, Coquimba and
La Serena) decrease in number due to the seasonal heavy coastal fogs and its impact on the solar cells,
we expect that both of the younger falcons will attempt to breed somewhere in the Atacama Desert foothills
next fall, just like La Serena last year.
We hope that you enjoy watching the 2008 northbound migration progress as much as we expect to.
Thanks again to all of the FRG contributors, Clayton White, Mike McGrady, Keith Bildstein, the
Southern Cross team and the Chilean government for making this study possible. And a special thanks to Mark Prostor and Don McCall for providing us with the ability to follow the birds and learn about this migration via the FRG website.
For a quick summary of our Phase I/II results so far, please click here.
Project Overview:
The Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus) is perhaps the most widely distributed bird on earth. It occurs on every continent
(with the exception of Antarctica) and many isolated oceanic islands. Because of this broad distribution and subsequent isolation, 17-19 distinctive subspecies or “races” have evolved over time.
Despite their name, which means “wanderer”, the majority of peregrine subspecies are sedentary, remaining at or near their breeding sites throughout the year.
Only five subspecies are strongly migratory. All of them breed in the northern Arctic regions and migrate south in the winter. Two races nest in North America and three others breed across Europe and Asia.
The most highly migratory race is the North American tundra peregrine (F.p. tundrius), which breeds across the North American Arctic from Alaska to Baffin
Island.
The table below reflects a listing of the individual peregrine falcons currently
radio-tagged. Clicking on the individual bird in the table will take you to a
status page for that particular falcon.
Para nuestros
visitantes y amigos hispano parlantes, por favor contactar a nuestro
investigador asociado en Chile , Christian González para mayor información
sobre el proyecto .
