It has been a busy and exciting time for Latham’s Snipe tracking. Since the January update there have been some interesting movements in both the Jerrabomberra wetlands snipe and the Wild Bird Society of Japan snipe.
In Canberra, ELF50 hung around at Jerrabomberra wetlands only until mid-January and then headed out to western Canberra to spend about 3 weeks on an equestrian property, before then moving SE 65km to farmland around Ballalaba. It stayed there for about 2 and a half months. ELF51 stayed at Jerrabomberra until mid-March and then headed straight up to Gwydir wetlands. This is the third snipe we have tagged that has used Gwydir! It didn’t stay there long and moved on a few days later to southern Queensland. We haven’t had a data transmission since late March. Since then, ELF50 has left NSW (March 25) and turned up in Cape York 3 days later. It’s most recent April fixes are from the central west side of the Cape.
Meanwhile the Japanese tagged snipe have done all sorts of interesting things. One was in western Sydney for spring and left the area in mid-December to move westwards to the Lachlan River region near Forbes, where spent about a month and half. It’s most recent fixes were from south-east Queensland, including a fix south of Great Sandy Strait.
The second snipe stayed in the same ~20 sqkm area of farmland SE of Tamworth for 5 months. It left in mid-February stopping off in the Cairns area for a short period, and then straight on to Japan, arriving in southern Japan at the end of March. This is the first ever complete & documented migration of a satellite-tagged Latham’s Snipe. Hooray! And congratulations to the WBSJ for this success.
The third snipe spent four months of the spring-summer period in the ACT alps and then went missing in action for a while, before turning up on northward migration in early April. The exciting news is that it is also back in Japan, on Honshu in the Kanto region.
The map below shows recent fixes from all five tagged snipe.
One of the noticeable patterns this season has been some unexpected movements westward, most likely caused by the massive rains and floods in eastern Australia over the last 2 months. The other thing we have noticed is apparently late departures of snipe from the south, with birds still being present at sites for longer or in larger numbers. Hopefully we might get some deeper insights about these migration patterns when it comes to analysing the tracking data alongside observational data in the future.
The national surveys again produced some great results. Birgita is fortunate to have had asssitance from Jack Winterbottom with the data entry and the January count results will soon be compiled. There is no doubt that all the rain over the 2021-2022 season has affected the snipe count results, with some areas having lots of snipe and others having virtually none, because there has been too much water or vegetation has become too tall.
In the coming two months, we will be embarking on a small project to produce guidelines for the management and restoration of snipe habitat. If you have any interest in getting involved, please contact Birgita.
Wood Snipe tracking update
A brief update on other snipe tracking news. The wood snipe team had an unexpected success in February when one of their tagged birds suddenly transmitted again after a long period of no data transmission (due to a flat battery). The data showed the bird in the Guizhou province and the activity data suggested it was wintering there. This represents the first wintering (non-breeding season) record for China, which is a fabulous outcome for the team.
Latham's snipe project 