The Mystery of 35+

Have you taken your logger off, Daniel?

At the end of January logger 14 started transmitting overlapping GPS co-ordinates, signifying it was not moving. Was the bird dead or had he somehow lost his logger? I am in UK at the moment working in the lab (a blog post on that soon) and preparing to fly out to sunny Portugal for the start of my next field season, so Carlos Pacheco kindly went to the site. It is a pretty, rural location between the towns of Castro Verde and Beja in South-central Portugal. White Storks flew off from about 30 nests but, despite searching, there was no sign of the logger or a dead stork. This means there are now 14 active loggers instead of 15, but the good news is it seems Daniel is not dead. Perhaps he managed to remove his logger and it is lying out of sight in a nest? I shall up date you on whether I manage to catch sight of Daniel when I visit this location in a few weeks. If any of my readers are out in Portugal and see blue ring +35 do let me know. See 'How You Can Help' tab for more details.

I had hoped to recover all the loggers when they fall off (hopefully later rather than sooner!) by visiting the location of the overlapping co-ordinates, it looks like this one may have escaped!