dhogaza
Posts: 525
Joined: Feb. 2006
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| Quote | That's an interesting observation about the amount of body fat related to low or high-recruitment years and spring weather. If it was mostly in the accipiters, maybe they just got extra fat picking off the dickie-birds who didn't have as much cover as usual.
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Heh ... maybe!
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Did the buteos show the same pattern? |
The project I worked on for so many years didn't catch all that many red-tails (typically <100 red tails out of 3000 raptors trapped in a season) and other buteos rarely get trapped while passing by in migration (I trapped the first swainson's hawk banded by the project after the project had been running for a couple of decades, for instance).
The red-tails we caught always tended to be on the famished end of the scale ... the site tends to have strong thermals during their peak migration and they pass by far overhead and can't be bothered to come visit for lunch ...
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