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29 Sep -- Felix has
crossed the crossed Panama (scroll down for details) and is now sampling
the taste of Pacific Ocean fish. This is really rare for East Coast
Ospreys. He's only the 3rd tagged Osprey that we know has gotten his
talons wet in the Pacific (Ms. Charlotte and Comet are the others).
For some reason we got more fixes for his
crossing of the Caribbean than were available when I made the last map. A
couple of interesting points come to light here. The first is his change
of course shortly after the 9/23 11:00 point on the map. Why did he make
this shift from just south by southwest to south by southeast? And then
back to his original course? Winds perhaps, but would the winds shift that
much and then swing back so quickly?
Right where I've marked the points for 9/23-4 it
appears he took a breather on a boat. There's an 12 hour period where he
reversed course and headed NW, covering only 15 miles, between 23:00 on
the 23rd and 11:00 on the 24th. The next fix, at 12:00 on the 24th has him
right back on course for the shores of Nicaragua.
Including the 12 missing hours, he landed
in Central America more than 50 hours (we don't know exactly when he
landed) after leaving Cuba, having covered 802 miles (1292 km).
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Felix took 3 days on
this crossing of Central America. He started out in southeastern Nicaragua,
passing into Costa Rica on the afternoon of the 25th. He took care of the
rest of Costa Rica on the 26th (he has been starting his migration around 3
or 4 PM) and spent the night of the 26th in northwestern Panama. That
afternoon he crossed the mountains and made his way down to the Gulf of
Chiriqui, winding up on the Islas Contreras--mere flyspecks on a map of
Central America.
Over the three days he covered 339 miles (546 km).
Who knows what he'll do next?! Odds are that he'll
move east and head into South America, but this is a bird that obviously
didn't read the Migration Instruction Manual.
These were the last locations we got from Felix. We don't know if he died or
if his transmitter just failed. After his phenomenal crossings of both a
good hunk of the Atlantic and a lot of the Caribbean, it's hard to imagine
him dying in Panama. Shooting is always a possibility, and we can't rule
that out. The optimist in me says we'll stick with the mal-functioning
transmitter.
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