#Repost @playerasdelperu • • • • • • #Repost @migconnectivity • • • • • • This #Tracking Tuesday features, Laura McDuffie term biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Master’s student @uaaphotos Typically, when people think of #shorebirds, they envision gangly, long-billed birds probing for invertebrates along sandy or rocky coastlines. This is hardly the case for the #lesseryellowlegs a medium-sized shorebird that breeds in the #boreal #forest of #Alaska and #Canada and spends the majority of the non-breeding period within the agricultural habitats of the #Caribbean and Central and South America. Over the past five decades, shorebirds have declined at an unprecedented rate. Limiting factors include habitat alteration, urbanization, agrochemical application, climate change, and for the lesser yellowlegs, unsustainable harvest at several non-breeding locations. In May 2016, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Alaska and the Migratory Bird Management program began deploying light-level #geolocators on breeding lesser yellowlegs in #Anchorage #Alaska Our goal was to determine where the species occurs during the non-breeding season. In 2017, birds returned to the breeding sites, but to our dismay were incredibly difficult to recapture for data retrieval. This serious predicament ultimately changed our objectives, and as a result, expanded our study extent to include Kanuti National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska, Yellowknife, #NorthwestTerritories Ft. McMurray #Alberta Churchill #Manitoba James Bay, #Ontario and Mingan Archipelago #Quebec. During the summers of 2018 - 2020, partners at Alaska Department of Fish and Game, USFWS, Environment and Climate Change Canada, and Trent University deployed @lotekwireless GPS pinpoint tags on breeding adults (recaptures not required!). The GPS tags are accurate to ~ 10m, which has allowed us to examine the lesser yellowlegs occurrence within countries practicing shorebird harvest. Since 2018, we have successfully deployed 98 (and counting) GPS tags, as well as banded over 430 adult and juvenile lesser yellowlegs. ... Vean la historia completa en @migconnectivity #avesplayeras #avesmigratorias #migratorybirds #birds https://www.instagram.com/p/CCGUnMzju7z/?igshid=19p3wpdk0tafk
