Watamu Marine Association, Kenya: Managing Kenya's premier beach resort.
WATAMU NEWS
Here we'll bring you regular news and events from Watamu, keeping you informed of life on the beach!
Here we'll bring you regular news and events from Watamu, keeping you informed of life on the beach!
A Rocha Kenya have made a huge discovery with this Greater Sand Plover which was tagged in 2004 and spotted again in India in 2015 and 16. This amazing story of a little bird which is known to fly over 2-2,500 kms
Direct from A Rocha - "AWESOME news!! A Rocha Kenya have just heard from a guy called Suman in western India at Modhva Beach, near Mandvi, Kutch, Gujarat, who sent me the first image below of the Greater Sand Plover that was photographed at the same site on 10 April 2015 together with one he photographed on 29 March this year also with a colour flag...BUT the flag script was hidden so we couldn't tell quite which individual it was! Well... a couple of days ago he emails me again saying he'd looked through his other images and found the second photo below - where in the blown up section you can read the flag as 'TA'... the SAME bird!
The ringing details, therefore - this bird was first ringed on 4 November 2004 at Mida Creek, Kenya, by Francis Argyle, a volunteer ringer with A Rocha Kenya, then retrapped on 16 September 2013 when we put the colour flag on it. It was then photographed en route to its breeding grounds last year at Modhva Beach and was the FIRST recovery of the species for East Africa.
Now the very same individual has been photographed at the same location a year later (though two weeks earlier) proving that they use the same staging sites along their migration route. It may also be that they spend quite some time here fattening for the final flight across land of 2-2,500 kms including over the Himalayas, part of China and quite probably on to Mongolia...
This makes the bird 11 years, 4 months and 26 days old from when it was ringed - and it was an adult then!
Also see: http://www.watamu.biz/