The two pintail hens made a voyage of 10,000 miles over 10 months.
As hunters and bird watchers track the waterfowl migration each year, many of them look up to the clouds of southbound birds and ponder: How far can ducks migrate in a day? Earlier this month, a pintail hen gave us an answer.
But she’s not the only duck to make such an epic migration. Days after Link pieced together one pintail’s journey, he saw that another tagged pintail hen had taken a similar route, flying all the way to Russia and back. He says that bird is currently up around Great Falls, Montana, and he expects the two hens to head back to Louisiana any week now.
Also, unlike old-school transmitters that use VHF technology and require researchers to actively search for signals, the new, lightweight transmitters rely on GPS-GSM technology and use cellular networks to transmit data in real time. This means that as long as the bird is close enough to a cell tower, Link can see its location on an hourly basis, along with other information such as the bird’s heading and flight speed.
When he logged onto his computer in late April, one of the green dots had vanished. This wasn’t unusual, and he explains that in his experience, only 50 percent of tagged pintails tend to survive from year to year. “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 hard to wrap my head around it, but they were on the same wetland at the same time in northeast South Dakota, and in Russia they were within a couple hundred meters of each other, but five weeks apart.
“It could be they’re losing habitat, or it could be they’re actually gaining habitat in the north due to climate change,” explained 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.”
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