Having been involved with one attempt to track a red-tailed hawk,
and being associated with an organization which attempted to
monitor a migrating Cooper's hawk, I can confirm that tracking
can be a hell of a lot harder than one thinks. The Coop was
lost after 200 miles (one day), when the trackers following by
air got confused by signals bouncing around canyons and valleys
in the Bitteroot mountains of Montana.

The redtail was lost in essence by ground trackers getting hung
up in a maze of roads they were only partly familiar with and
traffic (this was a hawk migrating south out of the San Francisco
urban area). It took a month and several thousand miles of
tracking by auto before it was found wintering just north of
San Luis Obisbo.

And did any of you catch the hound-tracking story recently in
the press? Turns out some dudes found their hound's radio
collars inside a living alligator! After animal control dispatched
the critter (sigh), radio collars from dogs lost over the last
seven years were found! Apparently this 'gator was something
of a specialist in poaching hunter's hounds.

- Don Baccus, Portland OR <donb at rational.com>