Little ringed plover with light-loggers

As a pilot study this year 9 Little Ringed Plovers (Charadrius dubius) have been outfitted with 1 g light-loggers (geolocators). These are part of this years CAnMove light logger effort to track migrating birds with this relatively new technique. The workings of light-loggers have been explained by Raymond Klaassen (see blog archive of this site), but in short the device measures the light intensity and store a value with some time resolution (10 min), and from this we get day length and hence geographic position along a time-axis.

The picture on the left shows a male LRP with a just mounted light-logger, seen as a little green blob on the lower back. Project assistant Astrid Hedenström marvels over the avian wing morphology, before releasing the bird . The close-up picture on the right shows the female before relase. Note the brownish ear-coverts and breast band, and a thin yellow orbital ring around the eye, typical female characters in this species. We have great hopes for this species should we manage to re-catch some individuals next year. The Swedish bird ringing atlas suggests a SE migration direction for Scandinavian LRPs, with one amazing recovery from as far as India!