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kodak.com
presents
Dennis Money and Mike Britten
Peregrine Falcons
May 9, 2001
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Penny:
Dennis, May we have a full update on the Millennium Brood? Thanks for the site!
Dennis Money:
The Millennium Brood was a special brood, due to the fact that one of the female falcons named Mary Ann was outfitted with a satellite transmitter and a special harness was made for her to carry that transmitter, and she was being monitored by three French satellites to determine her location. In the event that she migrated, we might know where in the world she went to. The signal was received from this bird until late August. Whether the transmitter's battery died or if it just stopped operating, or whether the bird met a fate, no one really knows. Of the other three birds one was found dead and the other two are unaccounted for. But that in itself is not unusual because the word 'peregrine' means wanderer. These birds can travel great lengths, across the ocean, across North America, and be in other cities or on other mountaintops, and no one has been able to read their leg bands yet.
Mike Britten:
I worked on a peregrine recovery program in Utah where we banded young birds. One of our birds was seen and photographed in Japan, so they indeed do go a long way! We thought that possibly this bird made it to Japan on board a ship. There are reports of peregrines joining with boats in the ocean and staying with them for days and weeks, hunting birds from the superstructures on the ships.
Dennis Money:
That's a great, Mike! Peregrines from Greenland routinely migrate to North America non-stop without the aid of a ship. So they have vast capabilities to fly extended periods of time over large bodies of water.
Mike Britten:
I studied peregrines using satellite telemetry, the same technology that Dennis was referring to in the Millennium Brood. One of our birds from Alaska went to Argentina (near Buenos Aires), and all of them migrated great distances, many thousands of miles.
Dennis Money:
Mike, do you have any idea how many days it took to go from Alaska to Argentina?
Mike Britten:
Yes, the time that it took them to migrate was on the order of months. In other words, four weeks to six weeks.
Sue Weiland:
Thank you for spending this time with us! The site is fabulous! Did the fourth chick hatch late or was it there all the time? If late, will that affect its development?
Dennis Money:
They do hatch at different times, and usually the last one to hatch is a little bit.well, not necessarily smaller, but has somewhat of a lesser advantage than his older siblings. But we feel that all four eggs this year hatched within a day or so, so this shouldn't be a problem. The difficulty in telling when they hatched was that Mariah kept sitting on them and it was basically a guess from the adult observers as to when everyone had finally hatched.
Mike Britten:
They usually lay four eggs, but don't start incubating until the third or fourth egg is laid. The chicks don't begin developing until the adults start incubating so, as Dennis said, usually three of them are on the same schedule and one is a day or two behind. I didn't mention that there's about forty-eight hours between laying subsequent eggs.
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