Wednesday, February 13, 2008

A Long Distance Traveler

It's been a while since I've posted but I had a neat piece of news recently that I want to share. Mark (my banding buddy) got a note from the Bird Banding Lab that one of our banded birds had been reported. Now, I'm not sure if everyone can appreciate how big a deal this is but to have someone else find one of our birds is something to celebrate. It turns out that a hatch year, female junco that we banded at Ritter Farm Park (Lakeville,MN) in October of 2005 was recovered on December 22, 2007 in Stillwater, Oklahoma. This means that the bird had migrated south in 2005, north in the spring of 2006, south again in the fall of 2006, north in the spring of 2007 and south again in the fall of 2007. My assumption is that the bird was on it's wintering grounds when it died.

This was one well traveled bird.

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