In January 2008, the SCPP field team (Mark Prostor, Kathy Gunther and Bud Anderson) journeyed south to Chile for a three week
trapping effort beginning near the city of Puerto Montt at approximately 41 degrees, 30 minutes south latitude.
Our goal was to locate and satellite tag the southernmost known migrant tundra peregrines in the world.
The earlier SCCP field team, (Zach Smith and his wife Elizabeth, Mark Hopey and Kathy Gunther) had located several falcons
during their two-week survey in this region of Chile in December 2007 with advice from our Chilean team member, Christian Gonzalez, in Santiago.
Based on their observations, we began our search near Puerto Montt, approximately 900 km (570 miles) south of Santiago.
On his first day out on a beach with the bike, Mark managed to capture an adult female almost immediately. We called her “Chamiza”
in reference to the area where she was caught.
She turned out to be a most remarkable peregrine. Her plumage was unlike anything any of us had seen before (in the arctic, Padre Island
or South America) and we were completely puzzled about where she might be from. Her pale plumage, especially her head, was reminiscent
of a Pallid Falcon, the rare color morph from Patagonia, but the color was not quite right for there either. Her appearance is most similar
to the very pale bird discovered by Gordon Court at Rankin Inlet, AK. a number of years ago and shown in a photograph from Brian Wheeler’s book,
Raptors of Western North America (2003) on page 495.
We made the decision to go ahead and tag her to learn where she will go later in the year. Will she fly north to the arctic or
will she hang back and eventually head east over the Andes into Patagonia? We are all watching her signals very closely. Either way,
it will be remarkable to discover her geographic origins. Subsequent signals since January show that she is remaining in the Chamiza
region until now (March 2008).
Check out her satellite map and look at how she flew over the local volcano, Volcan Cabuco (2,015 m). Pretty spectacular. We have also learned that she
likes to vary her roosting location and seems to prefer sleeping in trees in the Andean foothills.
Next, we worked the area near Puerto Montt, eventually heading out to the Pacific coast where Mark nearly
caught an adult male tundra bird just north of the island of Chiloe (latitude 41 degrees, 40’ and 03” south).
He had a very good look at this bird at close range and considered it to be a classic tundra peregrine. So
we consider this to be the southernmost record for this migrant race.
From there, we traveled north, paralleling the Chile coastline, all the while looking for more falcons.
As Christian Gonzalez and our earlier survey team found out, it is very challenging trying to locate falcons
in this environment of extensive forests of Pine and Eucalyptus trees. Road access to the coast is limited,
open areas are sparse and access to many potential sites is difficult.
But we were able to finally find birds near Constitucion, a coastal town about 265 km (165 miles) south
of Santiago. This is an area of extensive coastal dunes situated adjacent to an enormous freshwater wetland
creating perfect habitat for tundra falcons. It is remarkably similar in many ways to Padre Island, Texas,
the coastal dune fields north of Veracruz, Mexico and the deserts of Peru and northern Chile.
During our week there, we captured an additional five adult peregrines. We judged three of these birds to
be definite tundra falcons, basing our opinion on their wing measurements, pale heads, gray backs and white
fronts. So we tagged and released them (Paco, Fireball and Elizabetha) back to the dunes.
The two other adult females (Island Girl and Dune), which we released untagged, only confirmed what we
learned last year in the northern deserts of Chile. Separating the two races of reddish-fronted peregrines here is difficult if not impossible in many cases. In hand, some of these southerly Chilean
cassini are indistinguishable from anatum-type adult peregrines. It is especially difficult to separate them when the birds are molting flight feathers and wing measurements become useless. So rather than tagging them with expensive satellite transmitters only to have these two falcons possibly remain in Chile, we decided to let them go back into the wild banded but untagged.
Analysis of their DNA in the future should clarify their geographic origins and prove us right or wrong
in our decision to release them.
In the meantime, the four new GPS-enabled satellite transmitters have just shifted to the northbound migration
regime of two signals per day, one generated near midnight and the other in the afternoon. We expect the
birds to begin migrating sometime in the first two weeks of April and invite you all to join us as we
hopefully discover their routes, timing and breeding areas.
So far, we have found that the new birds have remarkably small ranges centering primarily on the coastal
dune system. It appears that the two males are literally sleeping among the dunes, while Elizabetha seems to prefer to sleep in different pine trees on the forested ridge well back from the coast.
Additionally this season, we’ll be watching both Sparrow King and Seven to see how their migration this
season compares with their movements from last year. Will they leave at the same time as last April? Will
they take the same general routes north? Will they use any of the same roosting sites for sleeping? And
will they return to the same eyries (nest sites) in the north at about the same time as last year?
Finally, as the transmitter signals for the three resident Chilean peregrines (Houdini, Coquimba and
La Serena) decrease in number due to the seasonal heavy coastal fogs and its impact on the solar cells,
we expect that both of the younger falcons will attempt to breed somewhere in the Atacama Desert foothills
next fall, just like La Serena last year.
We hope that you enjoy watching the 2008 northbound migration progress as much as we expect to.
Thanks again to all of the FRG contributors, Clayton White, Mike McGrady, Keith Bildstein, the
Southern Cross team and the Chilean government for making this study possible. And a special thanks to Mark Prostor and Don McCall for providing us with the ability to follow the birds and learn about this migration via the FRG website.
For a quick summary of our Phase I/II results so far, please click here.
Project Overview:
The Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus) is perhaps the most widely distributed bird on earth. It occurs on every continent
(with the exception of Antarctica) and many isolated oceanic islands. Because of this broad distribution and subsequent isolation, 17-19 distinctive subspecies or “races” have evolved over time.
Despite their name, which means “wanderer”, the majority of peregrine subspecies are sedentary, remaining at or near their breeding sites throughout the year.
Only five subspecies are strongly migratory. All of them breed in the northern Arctic regions and migrate south in the winter. Two races nest in North America and three others breed across Europe and Asia.
The most highly migratory race is the North American tundra peregrine (F.p. tundrius), which breeds across the North American Arctic from Alaska to Baffin
Island.
The table below reflects a listing of the individual peregrine falcons currently
radio-tagged. Clicking on the individual bird in the table will take you to a
status page for that particular falcon.
Para nuestros
visitantes y amigos hispano parlantes, por favor contactar a nuestro
investigador asociado en Chile , Christian González para mayor información
sobre el proyecto .
