24.06 Blog news

Since our geese do not do anything spectacular or simply do not give us any signals, I found a bit time and added some information on the blog. You can now meet all our geese in 'Tagged birds' section and read about how do we obtain the data in 'How does it work'. I also added one more link ('Geese in Svalbard) to 'More about geese' list on the right hand site of this page. There (unfortunately only in Norwegian), you can learn more about breeding, nesting, and feeding places of all goose species visiting Svalbard and many more information. Enjoy

24.06 Only house work

R53, R58 and R33 are silent but Ingunn, Danuta and Lukasz seem to settle down. Pink footed geese are monogamous meaning that they have one partner for the whole life (unless something bed happens like in our case:). While female is incubating eggs, male is guarding the territory around the nest and takes care of the female. That is why all the positions come from one spot because males basically do not move much at this time. Below is a zoomed in example of the positions of guarding male:

and the overview where are our geese now. Johnny is still looking for a place to nest (if this is still possible so late in the season) and is now in Edgeøya. This is well known pre-nesting place of pink footed geese.

It is amazing that all our geese tagged last year show such site fidelity: they nest in almost exactly the same position as last year. Below is the map with the positions of Ingunn: filled circles 2011 and ringed circles 2012:

and the nests locations (from 2011 and 2012) of Danuta. Map reproduced with permission from Norwegian Polar Institute using TopoSvalbard.

and Lukasz:

12.06 Johnny on the wings again

Johnny decided not to breed on Bird Island. He took 'classical' route and set off to Svalbard 5th of June. This is 2-3 weeks later than other tagged geese so hopefully he can still find an empty patch to set up the nest. Good luck boy!!!

1.06 Hard decision of R53

As I wrote previously, very energy demanding settings of the transmitters caused the batteries to get empty and not let all gps positions to get uploaded through ARGOS system. Closer look at ARGOS positions of R53, showed that this goose tried to leave Vesterålen 4 days earlier (22.05) but had to turn back, probably due to heavy wind. Geese try to choose the most optimal conditions before undertaking long journey towards the North.

1.06 Less means more

From today, all the tags change sending protocol. So far they were programmed to collect one gps position every hour and than send it through ARGOS system every second day. This is very energy demanding process and sometimes solar panels were not fast enough to recharge and we were loosing the signals. Now, we will (hopefully) get 4 positions per day uploaded through ARGOS every 4 days. And hopefully this means more positions.