Whimbrel Fall 2012 Migration Log

By Sathya Achia Abraham

Through the 2012 fall migration of the whimbrels, the Center for Conservation Biology, a partnership between Virginia Commonwealth University and the College of William and Mary at the VCU Rice Center, kept the global conservation community abreast of the progress of the birds they have been tracking.

As of Sept. 10, five out of six satellite tagged whimbrels were wintering in the coastal mangrove wetlands of Brazil, and the sixth was wintering in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. 

09/05/2012 – Hope, a whimbrel from Virginia, was spotted in a mangrove wetland located on St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. She flew the 1,600-mile leg in just over 48 hours, beginning just before midnight on Sept. 1, and landing around 1 a.m. on Sept. 4.  This bird flew into St. Croix just ahead of a stalling Tropical Storm Leslie. 

This is the fourth winter season that the team has tracked this bird to the same exact location, called Great Pond, on St. Croix. Hope shows similar uncanny fidelity to her breeding site in the Mackenzie River Delta and two stopover sites in Southampton Island, Nunavut, Canada and in coastal Virginia. The team has now followed this bird for at least 47,000 miles in three-and-a-half years of tracking. 

During this time, another whimbrel, Postel, which was tagged by the CCB’s partners in Georgia, was migrating from staging grounds in South Carolina towards the Caribbean/South America. This bird also evaded Tropical Storm Leslie. 

09/07/2012 – Postel was tracked to French Guiana, arriving in coastal Suriname earlier today. Postel flew almost the entire French Guiana coastline towards Brazil. The last “hits” from the satellite tag indicated that the bird was still in flight and only 30 miles from the Brazilian border. This bird flew 2,600 miles nonstop in about 85 hours from Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge in South Carolina to coastal South America. 

09/10/2012 – Postel, the whimbrel from Georgia, has flown to the mouth of the Amazon, roughly 170 miles north of Belem.

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