Little bird, big journey: A tagged Georgia shorebird flies 60,000 miles

Posted: January 27, 2016 - 10:22pm  |  Updated: January 28, 2016 - 5:22am

By Mary Landers

A shorebird nicknamed Postel, tagged on the Georgia coast in 2012, flew nearly 60,000 miles before his tag stopped transmitting in late November.

The whimbrel, which returned to the coast each spring over the three and a half years its satellite tag was active, has already given scientists insight into the importance of Georgia’s seemingly lifeless sandbars and spits.

Postel was captured in the marshes of St. Simons Island near Postel Creek in May 2012 by a team of biologists, including Tim Keyes of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

They caught Postel in a snare and immediately fitted him with a tracking device. The satellite tag comes with a tiny solar panel and a whip antennae. Weighing just a third of an ounce, it attached to Postel with a figure-eight harness that looped around each leg.

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Shetland windfarm project suffers court setback over rare bird

Judge rules Viking project should not have been given planning consent as ministers failed to follow EU birds directive

The future of a proposed windfarm on Shetland touted as one of the most productive in the world has been thrown into doubt in a legal battle over a rare wading bird and an obscure part of British energy law.

A judge in Edinburgh has ruled that the Viking windfarm project, set to be one of the largest in the UK, should not have been given planning consent last year, in a victory for local anti-windfarm campaigners.

Lady Clark ruled that ministers had failed to follow an EU birds directive when they weighed up the threats posed by the project to the whimbrel, an endangered wading bird which nests almost exclusively on Shetland.

In a judicial review decision that could have serious implications for other new renewable energy projects across the UK, Clark also found against Viking Energy because the company did not yet have an electricity generating licence.

The project's collapse would be a blow to Alex Salmond's ambition forScotland to generate all of its domestic electricity needs from renewable power by 2020. That goal is already in doubt because of the great cost and logistical problems involved.

The Viking project will comprise 103 turbines across 50 square miles of Shetland's main island. With a potential capacity of 370MW and 457MW, it is expected to produce enough electricity to power at least 175,000 homes if it goes live as planned in 2018.

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Scientists examine fall migratory pathways and habits of whimbrels

As they traveled from the east coast of Canada to the northern shore of South America, Akpik, Mackenzie, Pingo and Taglu stunned researchers and the global conservation community by flying some 2,500 miles out to sea, through the heart of the Atlantic Ocean, a migration route that has never before been documented.
The nonstop flight was quite a feat, especially for a medium-sized shorebird that cannot land on water. For one bird, the journey took 145 hours, or approximately six days, and a distance of 4,355 miles. The four birds, known as whimbrels, are part of a conservation initiative being led by scientists at the College of William and Mary/Virginia Commonwealth University Center for Conservation Biology at the VCU Rice Center, aimed at learning more about the migratory pathways and habits of whimbrels. The tracking work is being conducted with conservation partners from the United States and Canada.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-09-scientists-fall-migratory-pathways-habits.html#jCp