As previously mentioned in my last post 5 of our tagged birds decided to set up winter territories in Kentucky and more specifically all outside of Lexington. 3 of them including; Rowan, Rip, and Morpheus are all within 20-30 miles of each other which is pretty amazing to document. In case you are wondering all 5 of them are still in the same general areas they were in December. We can’t wait to see when they depart this spring, and we hope they will use the straits again but we will just have to wait and see.
However, not all of our birds decided to make the far trip to Kentucky to spend the winter and instead opted out for a shorter migration and a harsher winter. Patagium and Herald two of our adult females each decided that Michigan would be their winter vacation away from the boreal forest.
Patagium decided to settle in the Stanton area and has been there since mid- November. Herald on the other hand went a little further south and has been in the vicinity of Coldwater since the beginning of December, which is roughly 10 or 11 miles from the border of Indiana. (See map below).
It will be interesting to see when these two decide to head to the straits again and if they will have similar crossing times as they did last spring. Needless to say, migration is upon us, and we are excited to see our birds move North yet again. We will also have new exciting information as we get ready for our second field season starting in April where we will be adding more birds to our movement project, so stay tuned for more updates. As always hop on over to the https://redtailedhawkproject.org/ to check out work being done by my collaborators.
