Brent Goose with transmitter? (1 Viewer)

[JWN Andrewes]

Going through my pics of Red-breasted Goose at South Farmbridge in Essex today, I see that the Brent just to the right of it has a small black box attached to its neck. Some kind of transmitter perhaps?

 

[KC Foggin]

I once saw a duck with a small box around its neck and was told by the National Wildlife Assoc that it is used to transmit location of a species and it was only used on ducks. That was awhile ago.

 

[bjd]

It looks like a solar powered satellite transmitter. They are increasingly being used in studies of geese and swan movements including pink-footed geese, barnacle geese and whooper swans. Some tags can give data readings every second if programmed to do so which, as well as giving the usual location information, gives amazing levels of detail on flight paths in three dimensions.

 

[JWN Andrewes]

Thanks folks, interesting stuff!

 

[Xenospiza]

Here is last year's route of one such Pale-bellied Brent Goose:

• Colour-ringed and given a transmitter in Denmark
• Bred in Greenland
• Moulted on Svalbard
• Migrated to Denmark
• Moved on to the east coast of England
• Wintered in the Westerschelde estuary near Breskens

 

[Dave Ball]

Here is last year's route of one such Pale-bellied Brent Goose:

• Colour-ringed and given a transmitter in Denmark
• Bred in Greenland
• Moulted on Svalbard
• Migrated to Denmark
• Moved on to the east coast of England
• Wintered in the Westerschelde estuary near Breskens

I found molt in Svalbard after breeding in Greenland remarkable, but knowing how counter-intuitive great circle routes can be (to those of us brought up on Mercator projections), I plugged random locations in NE Greenland and Denmark into a great circle calculator, and got this screenshot (which goes nowhere near Svalbard):



Edit: for anywhere further SW in Greenland, the route would obviously pass further from Svalbard and nearer Iceland, which would be the intuitive stop-off point

Edit2: obviously the ‘random point in NE Greenland’ I picked was in the extreme NE to be as close to Svalbard as possible. It would be interesting to know the exact breeding site in Greenland - presumably the weather there deteriorates too quickly to allow moult* on the breeding grounds, but then taking a massive eastward hop over the Arctic Ocean, even if Svalbard is presumably milder than Greenland...

*yeah, just realised why my spell-chucker kept objecting to me spelling ‘moult’ as ‘molt’. Still never trust it though.