Update on spring 2017 catching and counting
November 20, 2017
It has been a hectic time for the Latham’s Snipe project team, so much so that we have been very slack in providing updates! So here they are all bundled into one.
Firstly, the bittersweet news from recent catching. We have experienced phenomenal catching success, with 2 catches of 13 birds and our record-breaking catch last weekend of 14! These numbers way surpass anything from last year and we think are an indication of both our increased experience with this species, and more birds being present in Port Fairy than during the previous years of monitoring. But in all this success, we have only managed to retrieve a single geolocator from bird U8. U8 was first captured on September 11 2016 at Powling Street wetlands and was recaptured on Monday 6th November in the wetland itself. However, the logger battery had died so we sent it to Migrate Technology in England to try and retrieve the data. Alas! The logger battery died in early February, before the bird migrated. What a blow to the team.
We have also made 2 other between-year recaptures, but neither bird was fitted with a geolocator last year. So we have reached the end of 2017 after 3 months of intensive catching efforts, to not obtain another migration track. We are sorely disappointed, but will make one last attempt in January 2018.
On the plus side we have deployed 26 radio transmitters which our honours student Andrew is tracking as part of his research project. So far around a third of those birds have stayed in the area, providing an interesting comparison to the radio tracking results from last year.
Onto counting, and this year has proved far more successful in terms of count effort, site coverage and relative numbers of snipe observed. We are proud to say that well over 80 sites were counted on September 23, contributed by a large number of fabulous volunteers from across all the eastern states and territories. That produced a count of 584 birds, which compares favourably to last January when 639 birds were counted from a similar number of sites, but at a time of the year when there are typically more birds around at core sites. In contrast, a lot of the other sites which usually hold small numbers of snipe had few or no birds at all. The conditions this year have been quite unusual, with SW Victoria, SE South Australia and SW Tasmania all being quite wet, and everywhere being quite dry, particularly NSW and SE Queensland. We wonder if birds have overflown and overlooked smaller sites when passing through the drier lands to return to their regular and reliable sites.
We look forward to the result of this weekend’s count November 25, to find out if this pattern still holds. Please do join the counts if you can. Contact Birgita or Richard for more information.