In a
quest to develop conservation strategies to protect a threatened species whose
population has declined 80 per cent in the last 50 years, scientists at the
University of Alberta have discovered the enigmatic nighthawk travels 20,000
kilometres each year in its annual migration from north of Fort McMurray to the
Amazon rainforest in Brazil.
"Until
now, we've understood very little about migration routes and wintering grounds
of the nighthawk," explained Elly Knight, a Ph.D. candidate who worked on
the research project with her colleague Janet Ng, U of A conservation biologist
Erin Bayne and researchers from the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center in
Washington, D.C.
The
research team needed to track the nighthawk to understand what risks it might
encounter during the eight months it spends outside of Canada each year.
"We
were surprised to find that they spent their winter in Brazil because most
observations of them are from further south, in Argentina. We also learned that
nighthawks return to almost exactly where they summered in the past year,"
said Knight.
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