The Siberian Grey Plovers have hatched:

It has been more than a month since Charlie arrived at its nesting area on 3rd June. We can now observe changes in Charlie’s activity pattern as time enters July, which would appear to demonstrate that its young have hatched.

In June, we can see Charlie mainly moved around the nesting area, with occasional travelling of 3-8km away from the nesting site. It is known that both male and female Grey Plovers share the duty of incubation. So these movements away from the nesting area were presumably Charlie taking a break to feed, and may also help to distract predators away from the nest.

The maps and traces below show the movement of Charlie around the nesting area (shaded white) in June.

Day 1-7: 3rd-9th June

Day 8-14: 10th-16th June

Day 15-21: 17th -23rd June

Day 22-28: 24th -30th June

As time enters July, we started to see obvious changes in Charlie's pattern of movement . Rather than using the nesting area as the “centre of movement”, Charlie seems to spend most of its time at the northern shore of the two lakes 2km to the north of its nesting area. It looks as though Charlie has hatched some young and has now moved them a little away from the nesting area to feed.

This last map and trace show Charlie's movement away from the nesting area (shaded white) in July

Day 29-35: 1st – 7th July

We will now wait and see how long Charlie will stay with its young and in a couple of weeks time, we hope Charlie will start showing us its southward migration!

The migration route of our birds: Ecosure (white), Mymi (red), Nad (blue) and Charlie (orange)

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

10 July 2016