After months of planning and preparation, All Hands Ecology’s Heron and Egret Telemetry Project has literally taken flight! All Hands Ecology Avian Ecologists Scott Jennings and David Lumpkin and Director of Conservation Science Dr. John Kelly spent an exciting eight days with collaborators Drs. John Brzorad and Alan Maccarone, who travelled from North Carolina and Kansas, respectively, to train us in capturing Great Egrets and outfitting them with tiny GPS transmitters. So far, we’ve tagged three Great Egrets, all at All Hands Ecology’s Toms Point in northern Tomales Bay.

Las aves fueron capturadas y marcadas de forma sencilla y segura, y las marcas registran datos sobre su ubicación y comportamiento cada cinco minutos.

Over the next few months, we will be expanding the geographic range of the project to track up to 14 birds nesting near tidal wetlands throughout the northern portion of the San Francisco Bay area, covering much of the area studied by the All Hands Ecology’s monitoring of nesting colonies. These exciting new data, which can be downloaded remotely, will allow us to answer numerous mysteries about how herons and egrets use and depend on the wetland landscapes of the SF Bay Estuary and beyond, helping to guide conservation of the important wetlands in our area and elsewhere. This is the first work of this kind on Great Egrets in the western United State, and we are excited to contribute new information to the network of researchers working in the mid-West and East Coast to better understand how regional populations of these birds may differ in how they move across the landscape and use habitats. Stay tuned for ongoing updates on project developments!

Más información sobre el proyecto >