A satellite fix has just come in showing that the third tagged spoon-billed sandpiper has made a move away from the Jiangsu coast!
CT, presumed to be male, has been at the Tiaozini mudflats on the Jiangsu coast since he was tagged in early October. His female counterparts made their moves away from the staging site weeks ago with HU moving south within days of being tagged and ET heading off two weeks later on 23 October. CT has taken his time, perhaps waiting to finish his annual moult of flight feathers, but now he’s made a definitive move south with the latest fix coming from just off the coast of Fujian province near the Guangdong border, over 1000 km from Tiaozini.
The big question of course is where is he going? Will he stop in Guangdong with HU? Will he continue to the Bay of Mottama in Myanmar to join ET? Maybe another familiar wintering site in Thailand or Bangladesh? Or will he lead us somewhere new, to an as yet unknown wintering site?
Check back regularly to see his progress.
Good luck CT!
CT (green track) on his way south, 13 November at 10.27 UTC. The yellow track is ET and the blue is HU. (Map data ©OpenStreetMap)
Exciting! Where is he going, we all wonder? Does anyone know why he went so far out to sea, to the SE, first? Heading for Okinawa!? Any idea?
Hi Paul.
Your comment’s made me realise that the map is misleading. On the map, ET is the yellow track, HU is the blue track and CT is actually the green track. I’ve just amended the caption to make that clearer – thank you!
So it’s actually HU that seemed to fly out to sea – over 200km into the East China Sea from Hangzhou Bay – before heading back to the coast and continuing southwest to Guangdong province. So same question, different bird.
In short, we don’t know for sure and can only guess. Firstly we need to consider that the satellite fixes might not be accurate – sometimes there are large error distances – but, in this case, as there are multiple fixes from the East China Sea and the fix furthest off the coast has an error distance of only 4 km, we can be fairly sure that she did actually go out there. So why would she do that? Well it just so happens that there was a typhoon in the area. Typhoon Haima formed on 13 October, swept up to China from the Philippines and emerged into the East China Sea from Hangzhou Bay on 22 October, just 12 hours before the fix came in from HU showing her out to sea! So it seems likely the typhoon blew her off course. That’s my guess at least! We’ll look more carefully at the satellite data over the next few months.
Best wishes, Rebecca
Really awesome. And yes, really mysterious why he headed so far out to sea first.
Hi Belinda.
See my reply above regarding the bird that headed out to sea. That’s my theory!
Best wishes, Rebecca
Hi Paul and Belinda, the track of HU (blue track) did indeed go out to sea, in late October. We don’t know for sure exactly why she (probably) took this route, but it could well be that she used the edge of a weather system and was effectively blown round the corner and down the coast. Speculation until we look closer at the weather data around then, but interesting that ET chose to start her long flight to Myanmar on a day with very favourable strong ENE tailwind. Suspect these birds are very clever at using weather systems to their advantage.
As we didn’t get any signals from CT’s tag (Green track) between him leaving Jiangsu and arriving in Fujian, we don’t know what route he (probably) took to get there.