Chapter Two: Summer 2018-2019
In our first season, we assembled a dream team of Wally, his team of Kolea Katchers from Brigham Young University Hawaii, and several of New Zealand’s most experience bird netters led by Adrian Riegen and set out confidently to catch our birds. Alas, for some reason PGPs in New Zealand turned out to be much more wary, unpredictable, and tricky to catch than their siblings in the rest of the Pacific. Wally and his Hawaiian colleagues were amazed, and we were frustrated. They completely avoided our cannon nets and mostly stayed away from the mist nets. Our many long days in the field produced just three birds.
Those three however did produce important results. Two of them, nicknamed JoJo and Amanda after two of our key team members, JoJo Doyle and Amanda Hunt, flew straight to Japan and then on to Alaska where they probably nested. That told us that, as Wally had expected, at least some of our Kuriri migrate north via Japan and nest in Alaska, which is what most PGPs that visit the South Pacific do. The third, Wee Jimmy, named after me, turned out to be a female with a mind of her own and went off on a wild journey via Guam, Okinawa, China and Siberia before also ending up in Alaska. Jimmy’s track was intriguing because it left open the possibility that some of our PGPs may nest in Siberia.1
Unfortunately, Amanda and Jimmy’s tags stopped broadcasting just as they were about to return south. But JoJo’s allowed us to follow her to Kiribati and Tonga – where her battery finally ran out of juice – and then there was much celebration when JoJo Doyle spotted her on our Stilt Ponds on 15 March.
1 Was it just coincidence that Wee Jimmy was named after a former travel editor of the New Zealand Herald? (Ed.)
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