As hunters and chicken watchers observe the waterfowl migration every year, a lot of them look as much as the clouds of southbound birds and ponder: How far can geese migrate in a day? Earlier this month, a pintail hen gave us a solution.
She was sitting on a puddle in japanese Russia when she bought the urge to fly again to her dwelling continent. With the wind at her again, she took off at roughly 10:30 p.m. and was hovering over the Bering Sea by midnight. Reaching floor speeds of as much as 150 miles per hour, the hen stayed airborne over southeast Alaska and the North Pacific. Twenty-five hours and roughly 2,000 miles later, the duck lastly touched down in a wetland someplace in northern California.
The chicken had traveled roughly 10,000 miles over the past 10 months, and her journey wasn’t over but. The hen’s ultimate leg will carry her throughout the Pacific and Central Flyways all the way in which to the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, the place she was initially tagged by researchers in January.
“It’s unbelievable,” says Paul Link, a lead waterfowl researcher with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. “It’s the first bird I’ve ever seen do this. We’re way over here in the Southeast, and most pintails don’t cross three flyways like that. Certainly, to my knowledge, none of them have ever crossed into a different continent.”
But she’s not the one duck to make such an epic migration. Days after Link pieced collectively one pintail’s journey, he noticed that one other tagged pintail hen had taken an identical route, flying all the way in which to Russia and again. He says that chicken is at the moment up round Great Falls, Montana, and he expects the 2 hens to go again to Louisiana any week now.
These two examples are instances of utmost long-distance and high-speed migration. According to Ducks Unlimited, most waterfowl fly at speeds of 40 to 60 mph, so with a 50 mph tail wind, geese may journey roughly 800 miles throughout an eight-hour flight. Typically, a mallard must feed and relaxation for days after such a journey. However, new monitoring know-how is giving us a fair higher image of how far geese migrate—and why they is perhaps going such lengthy distances.
Using New Tech to Track Birds
Link has been learning waterfowl migrations for the final 14 years or so. Formerly the administration coordinator for LDWF’s North American waterfowl administration plan, he now works full-time as a researcher for the company. He says this might be his fourth yr in a row monitoring pintails, however through the years he’s labored with almost each waterfowl species from specklebellies to blue-winged teal.
Link says developments in transmitter know-how have ushered in a brand new period of waterfowl analysis. He’s usually used conventional, backpack-style transmitters that weigh about 15 grams, however he was capable of get his fingers on lighter, 10-gram transmitters in 2019. The units characteristic small photo voltaic panels that preserve them charged for lengthy durations at a time, and a pair have even functioned over a number of migrations, he says. The small dimension of the transmitter additionally allowed Link to experiment with a brand new attachment technique that’s much less cumbersome for the birds.
“It’s basically like a skin piercing that holds the transmitter on their backs,” Link tells Outdoor Life. “There’s no harness or traditional neck-and-body loops like most transmitters we’ve used in the past.”
Also, in contrast to old-school transmitters that use VHF know-how and require researchers to actively seek for indicators, the brand new, light-weight transmitters depend on GPS-GSM know-how and use mobile networks to transmit information in actual time. This implies that so long as the chicken is shut sufficient to a cell tower, Link can see its location on an hourly foundation, together with different info such because the chicken’s heading and flight pace.
Working with graduate college students this January, Link was capable of match 30 pintail hens with these new transmitters utilizing his new attachment technique. He additionally match one other 27 pintail hens with the marginally heavier, backpack-style transmitters. All 57 birds had been captured in Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge on the southwest coast of Louisiana.
Over the course of this spring, Link and his college students saved observe of those inexperienced dots as they headed north towards the Prairie Pothole Region, which is the place many of the continent’s pintails nest each summer time.
“It’s my daily ritual,” Link says. “The first thing I do in the morning and the last thing I do at night is look at the control panel and see where all the birds are.”
When he logged onto his pc in late April, one of many inexperienced dots had vanished. This wasn’t uncommon, and he explains that in his expertise, solely 50 p.c of tagged pintails are inclined to survive from yr to yr. (He additionally admits that becoming them with transmitters doesn’t precisely assist their odds of survival.)
“This particular bird went offline in southeast North Dakota in late April, and from there we just assumed the worst,” Link says. “By the time we get to the first of October, you’re thinking that bird probably got killed on her nest and is in a badger hole or a fox den.”
He was flawed.
To Russia and Back
Link isn’t completely certain of the date, however someday between Oct. 2 and 4 he noticed that one of many transmitters had come again on-line. It was sending a sign from someplace in northern California. He figured the duck had been killed by a hunter.
“I’m like, oh boy, that can’t be good. It probably means that someone from California went to the Dakotas and shot her,” he says. “But I clicked on the dot and saw that it was one of the pintails. I clicked the link, expecting to see her bouncing from airport to airport … but nope, there goes her line. She went all the way up through the boreal to Alaska, then across to Russia and back across the Pacific to northern California. It all checked out, and since then she’s transmitted several times. She’s bouncing around the Sutter Buttes area, just doing what ducks do.”
Link was shocked, however he was much more shocked just a few days later, when he noticed that one of many hens fitted with an old-school transmitter had taken what he calls an “eerily similar route” to Russia.
“In fact, at three different points throughout their migration between Rockefeller and Russia they were within a couple hundred meters of each other,” Link says. “It’s laborious to wrap my head round it, however they had been on the identical wetland on the similar time in northeast South Dakota, and in Russia they had been inside a pair hundred meters of one another, however 5 weeks aside.
“Every time I see stuff like this it makes me wish I could get on a plane and go look at it,” he continues. “You know it’s something special when birds put their feet on the same piece of ground—or on the same sandbar in the same river.”
While the flight paths of the 2 hens had been related, their tales are considerably completely different. By wanting intently on the transmitter information, which reveals precisely how lengthy every of the birds stayed in a single place, Link ascertained that the primary pintail hen tried to nest in South Dakota in early April. She misplaced her nest after eight days—Link assumes it was depredated—after which she took off for Russia. But the second hen by no means even tried to nest earlier than transferring on.
“When this bird passed through the eastern Dakotas this spring, it was a desert,” Link says. “The ground was brown, and the few semi-permanent wetlands were sheet ice. So, she literally went another 4,000 miles and never initiated a nest. Just said this isn’t the year, I’m not going to risk my own health and waste the energy.”
Forced Migrations
Aside from giving waterfowl researchers one thing to scratch their heads over, the epic journeys these two geese undertook may additionally function proof that pintails are being compelled emigrate additional north due to local weather change and habitat loss. Last month, Outdoor Life reported on the extended drop in pintail populations on this yr’s waterfowl survey, and one scientist theorized that we could possibly be in search of pintails within the flawed locations throughout surveys.
“It could be they’re losing habitat, or it could be they’re actually gaining habitat in the north due to climate change,” defined Delta Waterfowl biologist Dr. Chris Nicolai. “And they’re just starting to move out of the areas we’re surveying, and we’re missing them.”
Link and different researchers have mentioned the compelled migration concept as nicely, and he says that within the case of the second pintail that flew to Russia, that is precisely what occurred. After selecting to not nest within the PPR, the chicken left the survey space previous to May 1 and was not included on this yr’s duck rely.
He additionally says it might make sense for the birds to fly farther north than they’ve traditionally due to the quantity of habitat they’re shedding on the prairie. And since pintails migrate sooner than different geese, they will’t hold round and anticipate situations to enhance in a drought yr—which is what gadwalls, mallards, and plenty of different mid- to late-nesters do.
“Pintails have a lot going against them. When they show up on the landscape, it’s boom or bust. If the conditions aren’t perfect, a lot of them aren’t even going to attempt to nest,” Link explains. “They’re also attracted to the shortgrass prairie landscapes, and that’s the area that’s seen the largest conversion to row crops here in recent years. They estimate that 1.8 million acres of native prairie was converted to annual agriculture in the Prairie Pothole Region alone last year.”
Unlocking the Secrets of Birds
Looking in any respect 57 of the pintails that had been tagged in Louisiana this January, it’s clear that we nonetheless have so much to study these birds. The two far-flying hens that Link tracked had been clearly probably the most intriguing of the bunch, nevertheless it’s attainable that they’re not a lot exceptions to the rule as they’re examples of what geese are able to.
At least eight or 9 of the tagged birds didn’t survive nesting season. Their transmitters had been recovered by Link and different researchers within the Dakotas and Canada. Meanwhile, two different pintails that Link continues to be monitoring might need made all of it the way in which to Russia this summer time, however as a substitute they did one thing that he finds much more fascinating. They rotated.
Link explains that though situations within the PPR had been bleak in early April, issues improved considerably on the finish of the month when two good blizzards hit the area.
“We actually had a couple pintails that somehow knew that,” he says. “They were up along the edge of the parklands in the boreal forest in central Canada, and they actually turned around and went back to the eastern Dakotas and successfully nested.”
The means Link sees it, there’s just one clarification for why these geese rotated. Why else would they return to a spot that they flew over weeks earlier than and deemed unfit for nesting?
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“There’s no reason other than birds communicating with each other. Ducks obviously share information, and they have a communication network that we underestimate,” Link says. “I’m sure there’s been a bird sitting in the parklands when another bird drops into their wetland and is over there chattering: ‘You wouldn’t believe how much water there is in the Dakotas, it’s over the roads!’ Stuff like that absolutely happens and nobody will ever convince me otherwise.”
Waterfowl researchers could by no means absolutely perceive what makes geese tick, or why one pintail would keep within the Dakotas whereas one other flies to Russia. But that gained’t preserve Link and others from attempting.
“As we unlock all these little secrets,” he says, “they’re surprising us at every corner.”