Migration13

Map making is in slow motion for a while as I prepare to migrate the whole site to a new server (and try to figure out how to deal with the amazing amount of data coming from the new cell-tower transmitters). You can still use the "Where's Waldo" map below to check on our 5 pre-2013 satellite-tagged birds, and scroll down to the "Company Directory" to see if any new maps are up (the bird's name will be in pink).

It's here! Thanks to the brilliant computer gurus at Movebank.org, we are now presenting data in an interactive format. The map below shows where our birds tagged prior to this year (except our cell-tower birds Rammie and Bridger) are now. You can also see where they were at any given point in time. The map automatically (yes!) updates itself as new data are received from the satellites. Note: You can zoom in to see habitat details along the birds' paths. Hover the cursor over a point to see which bird is which. To follow the migration, either pick a date with the calendar up at the top of the map, or drag one of the birds' dots along its track. As you do that, you'll see all the other birds move to where they were at that time. Way cool! Watch the race between North Fork Bob and Sr. Bones.

Where's Waldo?

July 2, 2013 - (updates to this narrative are highlighted in blue)
    Another spring migration is over, as is a very busy trapping season during which I tagged 11 adult males.
     Our 2 veterans (Sr. Bones and North Fork Bob) both returned to their breeding grounds for the 3rd time--a record for our telemetered birds). Bob started his trip home on the 15th--5-6 days earlier than in previous years. Bones started on the 19th, a day earlier than last year. They both got home on April 4th--Bob a few hours before Bones. Proving there's no end to surprising behavior from our tagged birds, Bob got home to Long Island and didn't even spend the night there. He crossed Long Island Sound and spent some time in Connecticut! In the three years we've followed him, he's never been to Connecticut. He probably was at one point (most likely as a juvenile) before we tagged him. Bob has been hanging around the nest pole he's been wanting to nest on for a couple of years. There are other birds with the same idea, however, so he's not going to get a chance to nest this year.
     Bridger, one of the two adult males from the Westport River outfitted with cell-tower GSM transmitters, rather miraculously found, on his way south, a couple of cell towers deep in the Amazon and sent us data for most of his travel to those points. As he started north, he found another tower in NW Brazilian Amazonia, so we know what he did over the winter. But we haven't heard from him since the 16th. By now it is clear that something happened to him. With these new transmitters, because we can go for a long time with no data, there's no way to tell what happened or where we lost him.
     We heard from his neighbor, Rammie, on 17 March--the first signal from him since late September last year! So we now also know where he spent the winter--in northern Venezuela. He was the first of our birds to arrive at his nest this spring. On 1 April, he made it all the way from northeastern Maryland to the Westport river--an impressive 310 mile sprint to get home. At that time, Alan Poole reported that 30-50% of the nests on the Westport River (Rammie's home turf) have birds on them, so he doesn't seem to be too late in his return. That said, as of 2 May, there were no eggs in his nest. He's there with his female, so it's pretty strange that she hasn't started to lay yet. They did finally lay eggs, but the nest failed for unknown reasons.
     Our adult male from New Hampshire, Bridgewater Art, settled down on the Tocantins River in northeastern Brazil (which is south of the Amazon). This was the farthest any of our birds have gone in that direction. He was one of three birds starting north on the 15th. He dilly-dallied for a few days before really getting going in full migration mode on the 20th. He got home on April 10th, and was greeted by a TV crew and reporters from several New Hampshire newspapers along with my colleague in the New Hampshire tagging work, Iain MacLeod. He's busy being a good Dad, taking his share of the incubation duties when it's his turn--when his mate is dining on a fish he brought home. He is now feeding 3 healthy young--a first for this nest!
     Very surprisingly, Snowy, our juvenile from the class of 2011, started north on the 23rd. This is by far the earliest any of our juveniles have started their first trip home. He even left before Belle (Class of 2010), who just started her second trip home from down on the Rio Madeira. She's only our 4th juvenile to make it back to its wintering area for a second time. Snowy spent over a week in a big marshy area on Cuba's north shore. He finally got going, but overshot the turn to the Florida Keys, so he wound up flying about 480 miles over the Gulf of Mexico from Cuba to the Florida panhandle. The trip to the Keys would have been about 130 miles! Snowy returned to Martha's Vineyard on May 10th. He quickly established a pattern of moving back and forth between Cape Cod and the Vineyard. He took a surprise trip up to Boston on June 26th and is now a bit west of Boston.
     Belle crossed the Caribbean successfully on the 6th. She spent about a week at a big lake (Saumatre) in eastern Haiti, and is now back on Cape Cod. No more birds left in the Caribbean! She got back to Cape Cod on April 26th. She's mostly been on the Cape, but she's made 7 trips over to Martha's Vineyard, where she is fishing the same coves on Tisbury Great Pond as out two newly tagged adult males.
     Between April 23rd and May 17th I think I put about 1,500 miles on my car as I tagged adult males from Stratford, NH, 20 miles from the Canadian border, to Tangiers Island out in Chesapeake Bay, about 525 miles south of the Stratford nest. Seven of these transmitters are the new cell-tower units, which give us GPS locations as often as every 2 minutes. Yikes, that's a lot of data!
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2013 Osprey cams and links:

YouTube Video of trapping and tagging an adult male on the Anacostia River in Washington, DC, with D.C. Chief of Police Cathy Lanier as my Osprey wrangler.

Dunrovin Guest Ranch - Lolo, Montana - High quality (of course--it's through Cornell's nest cam program). A rival to the Estonia cam. All the chirping are House Sparrows, which nest in the "basement" of many Osprey nests. They've evolutionarily figured out that Ospreys don't eat little birds and make great bouncers to keep hawks that do eat little birds away. What a deal!

Okoboji, Iowa - Great resolution on this one! There's snow on the ground and in the nest on 19 Apr-no eggs yet.

The Dunedin, FL, Osprey nest cam is up and running (and they have their first egg!). It's fun because you get to run the camera.

Hellgate Nest - Missoula, MT. Top quality cam.

Hog Island, Maine - Great cam! Two growing young (21 June) in the nest. This one's especially cool because there's a camera operator who zooms in and out when things happen in the nest-sometimes at the request of a large audience watching and texting to a message board.

Ayer's Island - New Hampshire. We tagged young here in 2011 and Art stopped here before he arrived at his own nest! It's mayhem at this nest as 2 or 3 males are trying to take over the nest and they're kicking eggs out of the nest as fast as the female can lay them.

Use these links to go straight to a bird's maps or bios. Names in hot pink are newly updated (11 March 2013). (Note-if you go to a bio for one of the birds tagged before 2012, you'll have to navigate back to this page).

Overview of our Osprey research
This is the 14th year of our satellite tracking and the 16th year that we have been following the Osprey population on Martha's Vineyard. The "we" here includes lots of friends and colleagues, but most importantly Dick Jennings. Dick "retired" to Martha's Vineyard where he is probably busier now than he was when he was earning a paycheck. He is a naturalist for the Trustees of Reservations and my right-hand man in all Vineyard Osprey trapping and censuses.
At the end of the 2012 trapping season we had trapped 72 Ospreys and satellite tagged 49 of that total (35 young and 14 adults). Over the 15 years of our censuses, we've counted over 900 nesting attempts and watched more than 1,000 young fledge! Link to details of our census work

Tagging new birds in 2013

Adults- It's shaping up to be a very busy year! In the first wave of trapping back in April, I tagged two adult males on the Anacostia River in Washington, DC, 2 adult males on Chesapeake Bay with GSM-cell tower transmitters, and 2 adult males on Martha's Vineyard. I've just deployed one GSM transmitter on Fishers Island, 2 satellite transmitters in New Hampshire and 2 more down on Tangiers Island in the Virginian waters. If Bridger's female lays eggs, we'll try to retrap him and move his transmitter over to a new bird. We tried to get Sr. Bones' transmitter back, but he was not interested in our trap. Again. We've got one more approach, but it looks like he's going to keep his backpack. He's had it for three years with no ill effects, so we're not worried about him.

Juveniles- 7 juveniles (Long Island, Martha's Vineyard, coastal NH, and Essex, MA) are on the calendar.

As 2013 began, we were down to seven surviving birds wintering down in South America--Sr. Bones and North Fork Bob (adult males) are both record setters on their 3rd winter carrying transmitters, Belle (juvenile from 2010), and Snowy (a juvenile from 2011) are heading north. It will be the second trip north for Belle and the first for Snowy. Bridgewater Art from New Hampshire was on the Rio Tocantins. Rammie and Bridger our cell-tower birds from the Westport River, MA, were hanging out under the radar. We didn't find out where they'd been until we got signals from them as they headed north in March. We only lost Bridger on the way north.

Who's Who - Bios of the Class of '13 (click on the name to go to the maps for that bird)