Adios
Charlie!
Just
when everybody was anxiously waiting for Charlie to set off from Siberia, it disappeared with no signal sent back since earlier this week. However, we do
believe that Charlie has almost certainly set-off on migration and that might have triggered the transmitter to malfunction or the harness to fall off.
This
means the end of our Grey Plover satellite tracking project, but we do hope the
journey doesn’t end here. If Charlie (or any of our other 3 birds) returns to
Roebuck Bay for their non-breeding season, there is a very high chance that
they might be re-sighted with their engraved leg-flags on.
After
all, we’ve already learnt so much on the migration of Grey Plover in the past 5
months. More research into harness design will be carried out to see if this
can be improved as we think this is the prime cause of our loss of
transmissions from our five units over a period of only five months. A lot of
the data collected is still to be processed and analysed scientifically, so as
to document the achievements, challenges and lessons learnt from this project.
This information will not only be very useful reference for similar projects, but
also advises conservation plan for the species in future.
 |
| Charlie in flight in Broome (photo by Nigel Jackett) |
So,
thank you and adios Charlie, we hope to see you again on the flyway!
 |
The migration route of our birds is shown in the map below:
Ecosure (white), Mymi (red), Nad (blue) and Charlie (orange)
|
Last but not least, South Australia Grey Plover CYA and CYB have already
started migrating south. Please continue to follow their journey from here:
Distance travelled by our Grey Plover since departing Broome:
Name
|
Leg Flag
|
Distance travelled
|
Ecosure
|
LLA
|
4,650km
|
Mymi
|
LLH
|
4,300km
|
Nad
|
LLJ
|
10,942km
|
Charlie
|
LLK
|
10,642km
|
The Grey
Plover project team:
Katherine Leung
Clive Minton
Ken Gosbell
Chris Hassell
Grace Maglio
Inka Veltheim
Maureen Christie
28 July 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment