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Travels so far: 5 Aug-31 Dec 09. After a month on the Cumberland
River in Tennessee, Buck's migration switch turned on on the 13th of
September. He followed a very conventional route and has now settled
down on a big lagoon on the western shore of the Gulf of Venezuela.
He explored up the Guajira Peninsula, almost reaching
Jaws' original hideout at Bahia Hondita, but then retreated back to
Jaws' second wintering area.
After 3 weeks in some great looking lagoons, he has
made two roadtrips, but couldn't find any greener grass (or better fishing), so
he's back at the shores of the Gulf of Venezuela as of 2 Dec.
Now at the end of the year, he's off on another trip
south.
Scroll down for detailed maps.
Migration begins.
5 Oct.
Skip to maps new since the last update (14 Dec).
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26-30 Jun 09.
These are the first locations for Buck
after we tagged him on the 26th. He had probably only fledged a day or
so before we caught him. He looked pretty clumsy landing and perching
around the nest. |
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1-8 Jul
09.
Buck is exploring a bit more, mostly
moving up the Great Falls Reservoir. He's still spending time on the
nest, but lots of his locations are in the trees across the reservoir
from his nest pole. This shift of family action is typical of the
behavior that Bill Price has seen in this pair and their offspring over
the years. |
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Three years ago, two Bald Eagles
hatched unexpectedly in the Carolina Raptor Center's Eagle aviary. The
aviary holds about 9 unreleasable Bald Eagles, a couple of which lay
eggs each spring. The eggs had never been fertile until that year, so
the staff was totally surprised when they went in to feed the eagles and
saw two eaglets! We put transmitters on both birds prior to their
release. I was checking on their whereabouts a couple of days ago and
discovered that one of them is spending the summer just 30 miles sw of
our Great Falls Osprey nest. It would be sort of fun if Buck wandered
down to the Monticello Reservoir so I'd have two tagged birds of two
different species at the same reservoir. |
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8-17 Jul
09.
Buck is expanding his horizon. He has
made his first trip up to Fishing Creek Lake, where Duke spent most of
his pre-migration time last year. |
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10-23 Jul
09.
Buck is really exploring now. He's
been down below the Wateree Lake dam on the Catawba, and all the way up
past the Landsford Canal to the southern edge of Rock Hill. It's
35 mi. (57 km from his northernmost point on this map to the
southernmost. |
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24-31 Jul
09.
Buck has settled down a bit and is
sticking close to home. |
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1-6 Aug
09.
Buck is on the move! This is a lot
earlier than his presumably full brother, Duke, who stayed up in Fishing
Creek Lake until he started migration on the 1st of September last year.
Buck followed the Catawba River north towards Charlotte
(he was about 15 miles from my house) and made it to Rock Hill, SC on 3
Aug. He returned to the nest area on the 4th, and then headed south on
the 5th. He spent the night of the 5th on Lake Marion's north shore then
headed due west towards Georgia.
While his first move looks like migration, I suspect
he's still in the dispersal period. He'll wander around a bit, maybe
even head back to the nest, and probably only begin true, directed
migration later in the month or sometime in September.
He made this move at the same time Hix, our Westport,
MA, youngster headed due north to Maine. |
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2-9 Aug 09.
Buck is moving, but not migrating. He
put on the reverse thrusters and flew north into North Carolina. On the
8th he roosted in Yancy Co, NC, about 25 mi. north of Asheville. on the
9th he pushed into Tennessee-a new state for our tagged Ospreys. |
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9-25 Aug 09.
Buck crossed four states (and the
Appalachians) in this period. He settled down along the Cumberland River
in Tennessee on the 14th and is still there (as of 29 August). |
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Travels so far.
4-25 Aug 09.
His
first move south looked like migration, but that would have been awfully
early. More typical for young Ospreys is an apparently random trek
across the countryside. Hard to imagine why young males would do this,
given their very strong propensity to eventually nest very near their
natal territory, but Buck is definitely a male, and he is definitely
racking up the frequent flier miles. The locations where he pitched his
tent each night are indicated on this map. |
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16-25 Aug 09.
Buck has settled down on a stretch of
the Cumberland River, above Cordell Hull Lake in Jackson Co., Tennessee. |
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25 Aug-13 Sep 09.
After a month on the Cumberland River,
Buck began his migration on the 13th. |
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13-17 Sep 09.
Buck started off on the 13th, heading
due south. |
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25 Aug 09.
Buck is following the Osprey migration
manual very closely.
As of the 26th, when he roosted a bit west of
Guantanamo Bay, he had flown 1,432 miles (2,305 km) in 12 days. |
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26 Sep-2 Oct 09.
Buck cruised through Hispaniola with a
couple of days rest in Santo Domingo. |
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29 Sep-1 Oct 09.
Buck made us pretty nervous when he
stopped in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Domincan Republic. Luke
tried wintering here, working up and down the same river. Luke
disappeared, probably the victim of a gunshot a few months after
settling down in this area.
We were thus much relieved to see Buck move on after
only two days here. |
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25 Aug 09.
Buck crossed 481 miles (774 km) of the
Caribbean in 25 hours. He left Hispaniola at 12:00 on the 3rd and landed
on the Colombia's Guajira Peninsula at 13:00.
He averaged only 19 mph (31 kph) on the crossing, which
is slow and somewhat surprising, as he appears to have been going with
the tradewinds at his back. |
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25 Aug 09.
Buck missed the absolute northernmost
point of land in South America here on the surprisingly arid Guajira
Peninsula by 20 miles. He also just missed Bahia Hondita, where Jaws
spent his first year and a half in S.A.
He roosted and spent a few hours on the shore of the
Gulf of Venezuela.
On the 6th he moved down to a big lagoon, where it
looks like the migration switch is now in the "off" position.
Since left Tennessee and began migration in earnest, he
has flown 2,562 miles (4,123 km) in 20 days (not counting a couple of
days on hold in eastern Hispaniola), averaging 128 miles (206 km)/day. |
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6-17 Oct 09.
Buck has settled into what looks like
primo Osprey real estate. In fact, Jaws spent his third winter at this
very lagoon area. |
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17 Oct 09.
A closer view of Osprey paradise. |
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5 Oct-1 Nov 09.
After over 3 weeks in the lagoons at
the western edge of the Gulf of Venezuela, Buck headed southeast on the
1st of November.
When I saw this movement, I made a bet with myself that
he would loop around and return to the lagoons up north. This is a
pattern that we have seen repeatedly from the youngsters after the
settle down for a while. It may be a few weeks or even a month, but they
often get an urge to explore. These "roadtrips" will often lead them
hundreds of miles out into unknown territory. Typically, they loop
around and return to the spot where they had settled down. These
exploratory loops will often be the first true navigation that we see in
a bird. It is navigation because the birds are returning to a known
location from a novel direction. This is different from what they do on
their first migration south, when they have no actual destination "in
mind," but rather just a general direction and something that triggers
them to stop migrating at some point. |
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19 Nov 09.
Buck did circle around and come back
to his lagoons on the shores of the Gulf of Venezuela. |
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13-20 Nov 09.
He's off again. This time he's on a
different route from the 1 Nov junket.
Where to next? Will he come back here?
Stay tuned. |
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19 Nov-2 Dec 09.
Buck is doing what many of our other
tagged juveniles have done--exploring the countryside, apparently
fishing (sorry) for a better location to settle down for the winter.
One of the interesting aspects of these trips is that
we see these birds using true navigation, some for the first time in
their lives. They head out in one direction and return to a known
location from a novel direction. How birds do this is one of the great
mysteries challenging ornithologists today.
Buck's trip covered 671 mi. (1080 km). |
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2-14 Dec 09.
Buck has settled down back at his
lagoon complex on the southwestern shore of the Gulf of Venezuela. Jaws
spent his second migration winter here back in '06-'07. |
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2-20 Dec 09.
Buck is off again, apparently
circumnavigating Lake Maracaibo. He made this loop back in early
November, but that time he went clockwise around the lake. |
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20 Dec 09-04 Jan 2010.
Buck settled down for a couple of
weeks. Unfortunately, it was cloudy when these satellite photos were
taken, so we can't get great detail on the area he's hunting, but it
appears to be very similar to the lagoons he was fishing up north.
Follow Buck's 2010 maps |