We had our first Chilean frost this morning. It’s the beginning of the end of the austral summer for the godwits and us. Soon winter will set in to the island, the godwits and I will depart for a boreal summer.
Today was the beginning of the end of our scans. From here on out we’re cleaning up trying to get resights on as many green flags as possible before we leave the island. We’ll spend a few days on the mainland doing some last bits of work and play before we head north! We rather appropriately headed to Caulín to do our last scan of the season there.
As we prepare to fly north so are the godwits. Almost all of the males are close or are done molting into their “breeding” plumage and many of the females are similarly close.
We measure body condition from afar by estimating the amount of fat in the abdomen (which is known to be correlated with total fat content) using a scale from 1 to 5. In Alaska, they’re pretty much all an average 3 except for a couple of skinny individuals and the odd fatty gearing up to migrate south. Here, in January they were still pretty much all average 3s. But now they’re starting to fatten up we’re seeing more fours and some that are about to cross the five threshold. Everyone is gearing up to leave Chile!
We started off our first scan of the last scans with a bang. We did really really well both by my work standards and our fun birding standards. During our full six hour scan, we saw all three green flags that have been regularly using Caulín and got focals on everyone. Additionally, I found the two females before and after low tide and got repeat focals on them! G spotted some distant Chilean Flamingos, a new species for the year which we’ve only seen once before, and then he found the fourth province record of Semipalmated Sandpiper - a Chile lifer for us both!
Here’s to continued success with our last scans!