JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. — We are just a little late for World Migratory Bird Day (Saturday, May 14) but, hey, what’s a day or two if you’re a bird on the wing? Especially a rough-legged hawk.
These relatively common but understudied raptors have been a focus of study by a collaboration of birdbrains including Jeff Kidd, Neil Paprocki, Jennifer Bridgeman, along with Bryan Bedrosian and the Teton Raptor Center. The RLHA Project (part of Kidd Biological Inc.) has now tracked hundreds of rough-legged hawks on their migration journeys throughout North America to better understand species movement and general ecology.
Prior to 2014, little was known about the travels of rough-legged hawks. We knew they migrated with the seasons but the distance these raptors travel is astounding.
One of the earliest birds used RLHA study is an adult female captured in Quincy, California in 2014. That raptor is now the longest tracked hawk in the program, providing data for the past 9 years, according to Jeff Kidd.
At this point, in excess of 100 remote-tracking devices have been deployed on rough-legged hawks by collaborators. The data shows some surprising stuff. For one, these hawks do, indeed, show route fidelity, and preference for using the same winter grounds and nesting sites. But the exact path they take often changes with the wind.
One adult female captured in Snowville, Utah in 2017 has made faithful annual trips to summer in northwest Alaska for five years now, according to GRP tracking technology. And that’s not hardly one of the longest journeys.
A male tagged by Bedrosian at the Teton Raptor Center regularly migrates from the Front Range of Colorado to the Northwestern Passages in Canada, above Hudson Bay nearly to Baffin Island. That’s more than 2,000 miles as the hawk flies, but this particular raptor takes a super-sightseeing route there, covering an astonishing 62,000 miles in its five years of transmitting data.
