Hi Tweets,

Tracee Geernaert writes about a migrating Peregrine Falcon:

>Three days later she was located 80 km south of
>Veracruz, Mexico, 1,400 km in 3 days which is 466 km per day. An
>incredible testimony to the flying ability of falcons.

This story was carried by the Globe & Mail, as well. I got to thinking
that's a pretty good chunk o' real estate she covered, so I tried to work
out how fast she's need to travel to cover the 1400 km (840 mi.) in three
days, or an average of 467 km (280 mi) a day. Well, there's around 12-14
hours a day of daylight at these latitudes this close to the equinox (late
Aug), and assume an arbitrary 3 hours a day in bathing and preening, hunting
and feeding. If that assumed downtime is close, then it works out she'd need
to maintain a steady speed just over 50 km per hour, or 30 mph. The average
speed is even slower if she did any twilight/nocturnal migration.

Then I remembered reading somewhere that a hummingbird was banded, then
recaptured in a mistnet 1400 km to the S only 16 *hours* later, having
migrated at an average speed of 88 kph (53 mph). Smokin'....

Then further trolling through some old Tweeters stuff hooked this from
Stuart Mackay about a Manx Shearwater:

>In one of the early studies
>on migration a bird which was about to fledge from a colony on Bardesy, Wales
>was transported to Newfoundland then released. It caught back in the colony
>in
>three days !!!!

That's over well over 4000 km (2500 miles)! That bird needed to cover almost
1600 km (1000 mi) per *day* to get back in such a short time.

Comparatively, that Peregrine is smelling the flowers along the way. She's
just pokin' along in the slow lane, admiring the view. '-)

Michael Price The Sleep of Reason Gives Birth to Monsters
Vancouver BC Canada -Goya
mprice at mindlink.net