Check out this great new Audubon Magazine article featuring Hummus the cuckoo and findings from our research using the Motus Wildlife Tracking Network!
This work was done on and around the Audubon Kern River Preserve
(run by Audubon California).
The data is in… and our Motus tower at Canebrake Ecological Reserve detected one of the Tricolored Blackbirds we tagged at a breeding colony April 2022! (The bird in this photo to be exact!)
While the 10 mile movement from its original tagging location to Canebrake may not seem like a big deal, it’s actually the timing of the detection that we’re all excited about. Tricolored Blackbirds are highly nomadic, moving almost year around to follow abundant food resources, and their post-breeding movements (especially in foothill populations like ours) are still poorly understood. There are scattered sightings of Tricolored blackbirds in the area during the winter, but this November 2022 detection represents the latest post-breeding record of a tagged Tricolored Blackbird in the Kern River Valley.
We now know that this bird bred in a patch of Himalayan Blackberry in Weldon and remained in the valley until at least late fall. By piecing together data from individual tagged blackbirds we hope to get a picture of where our population goes throughout the year. We hope to use this data to facilitate the protection of habitat and food resources for the species throughout the annual cycle. The bird seems to have moved on from the site, but we hope to catch up with him again soon at the local breeding colonies in March.
Winter flocks of blackbirds, including Tricolored blackbirds, are often seen in the Canebrake Ecological Reserve, East of SSRS.
Check out these shorebird movements along the Pacific Flyway this year! This study is part of a research collaboration led by The Nature Conservancy to examine shorebird use of overwintering and migratory stopover habitats in California’s Central Valley and beyond. Each bird was tagged with a small radio transmitter called a “Motus tag,” which is designed to be picked up by Motus stations (strategically placed, automated receivers with elevated antennas) as the bird moves across the landscape. SSRS Senior Research Biologist Pat Lorch installed a whopping 12 Motus stations across central California for this project, many of which picked up the shorebird detections shown on this map!
To learn more about this project, you can go to Motus.org and search for the California Shorebird Migration and Drought Study.
