Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Spring Migration summary

Indeed.they are common here but can be surprisingly hard to see.

Eight years back I was up in Oklahoma helping a guy put geolocators on purple martins. These micro devices record light intensity, time and date. They run for more than a year. The way it works is you catch the bird when it returns the following year and remove the device. The exact time of sidereal noon will give you the location on earth within 50 miles, hence you can use them to learn where that species goes and how fast it migrates.

The guy built these devices himself and IIRC also tagged about 30 painted buntings.

Incredibly, another friend of mine saw and photographed one of these tagged birds under a feeder during a cold front on South Padre island the following April. Gotta be at least a hundred thousand painted buntings in the world.