Two grey plover birds tracked leaving Adelaide and flying 13,000 km in three months

TWO migratory birds that spent the summer in Adelaide have been tracked to a remote Russian island in the Arctic Circle, having flown 13,000km in three months.

The grey plover, photographed at Thompson Beach in January 2016, with the aerial of the satellite transmitter visible, has flown 13,000km in three months. Picture: Peter Owen

TWO migratory birds that spent the summer in Adelaide have been tracked to a remote Russian island in the Arctic Circle, having flown 13,000km in three months.

The grey plovers’ journeys from Adelaide’s International Bird Sanctuary are the subject of a migration study and each carries a solar-powered satellite tracking device.

Both birds left Thompson Beach, west of Dublin, in March, but have chosen different paths to Wrangel Island, which is off Russia’s northeast coast.

So remote is the island that it is thought to have been home to the world’s last population of woolly mammoths up until about 4000 years ago.

The Advertiserlast reported on the progress of one of the birds, codenamed CYA, in April,

after it had flown northwest, over Australia’s central deserts and then east of Kununurra in Western Australia, before heading out over the Timor, Banda and Molucca Seas near Indonesia.

After flying over the islands in the Philippines, CYA clocked up 7340km on a flight to Taiwan, where the bird spent just under two weeks, before arriving at tidal flats of the Jiangsu coast of the Yellow Sea, near Dongtai city.

But the other bird, CYB, landed on the Chinese mainland at the start of April and had short stays in Hangzhou Bay and Laizhou Bay, before spending six weeks at Bohai Bay — a staging area for shorebirds to complete their migration to breeding grounds in the Arctic.

By the end of May, both birds had left Asia and flown over Russia before arriving at Wrangel Island on June 6.

In 2001, research conducted by Dr Clive Minton and Lorenzo Serra hypothesised that Wrangel Island, a protected sanctuary, was important for birds from southern Australia, and it is believed the grey plovers will breed there.

The Adelaide International Bird Sanctuary stretches 60km from the Barker Inlet to Parham and the research is partially funded by the Adelaide and Mt Lofty Ranges Natural Resources Management Board.

Environment Minister Ian Hunter said the arrival of the birds in Arctic breeding grounds after being tracked through the East Asian-Australasian flyway highlighted the international importance of the Adelaide sanctuary.

“The bird sanctuary is one of the world’s key feeding and roosting sites during Adelaide’s warmer months for all kinds of internationally significant birds such as grey plovers,” he said.

The sanctuary is expected to become a national park in 2018.

Originally published as Two grey plover birds tracked leaving Adelaide and flying 13,000 km in three months