Island Girl Moving?

Don McCall writes:



"There are still no recent GPS signals for any of the females, but a pair of low-quality ("0") Doppler fixes for Island Girl are very provocative. If valid, they would indicate that she has flown north for over 120 km late yesterday afternoon and evening, and is now about 40 km inland. The 0-qual points aren't usually considered very reliable if taken alone, but they can be fairly accurate (especially when occurring in clusters or with reasonable spacing and timing), and I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that Island Girl has now started her northern migration. We should know for certain in a day or two."



If this is correct, then we would have confirmation that she is a tundra peregrine as Kathy has predicted and not a resident cassini falcon.



It should also be noted that the coastal area of south central Chile often has heavy fog at this time of year. They are moving into the fall season right now. Even when we were trapping at Putu during early March, we experienced several days of heavy, dense overcast and fog.



And, of course, the transmitters are solar powered so the battery voltages are low due to lack of sunlight. Once the falcons move further north into the warmer, drier areas we should get an increase in signal strength.



We'll have to wait a bit to see, but right now it appears that she is almost due west of Santiago, en route north.