Marine Biology Commons^™

Tracking Landscape-Scale Movements Of Snow Buntings And Weather-Driven Changes In Flock Composition During The Temperate Winter, Emily A. Mckinnon, Marie Pier Laplante, Oliver P. Love, Kevin C. Fraser, Stuart Mackenzie, François Vézina

Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research Publications

Nomadic movements of migratory birds are difficult to study, as the scale is beyond the capabilities of hand-held telemetry (10 s of kms) but too fine-scale for long-range tracking devices like geolocators (50–100 km accuracy). Recent widespread installation of automated telemetry receiving stations allowed us, for the first time, to quantify and test predictions about within-winter movements of a presumed nomadic species, the Snow Bunting (Pletrophenax nivalis). We deployed coded radio-transmitters on 40 individual Snow Buntings during two winters (2015-16 and 2016-17) in southern Ontario, Canada, and tracked movements over a 300 by 300 km area with 69–77 active radio-receiving …