7th July 2020
Just when you thought it was safe to forget about Pacific Golden Plovers, after two months of radio silence one of the six tags we deployed this season seems to be working again. After hearing nothing from any of the birds following their departure from New Zealand in April we got a belated report from Ra on 8 June. This showed she had stopped off for a few weeks on the Japanese island of Honshu and was already on Alaskan nesting grounds near Shishmaref on the Seward Peninsula. Today (July 7) we’ve received a second report from her giving another GPS fix from Honshu and showing she is still around Shishmaref. That was great news. But even more exciting is the prospect that, if her tag keeps working, we might get some data what PGPs do on their southward migration. Last season’s programme, and now the reports from Ra, have confirmed the expectation that most of our PGPs migrate to the Arctic via Honshu. What would be fantastic would be to get see whether JoJo’s odyssey last season, which involved island hopping down the Pacific, is typical. Fingers crossed.
– Jim Eagles, Kuriri Project Coordinator
