21. Sabine's Gull Tracking

Tom Robben for Iain Stenhouse and Mark Mallory.  A very brief summary will be posted here. 

You can see this talk at 5 hours 38 minutes of the video recording:  COA's Birds and the Environment Science Conference - Online - YouTube

This is a working draft, under construction. 

Sabine's Gull is a very rare visitor to Connecticut, in Long Island Sound, and rare anywhere along the US East Coast.   Here is one such recent 2021 visit to Connecticut, in Long Island Sound, reported thanks to Nick Bonomo...

https://www.shorebirder.com/2021/09/labor-day-weekend-sabines-gull.html

Why is this gull widely distributed in the Arctic, but so rarely seen in the Eastern USA?  Away from its breeding grounds it is extremely pelagic, spending most of its life on the ocean, away from land. Its travels were not well understood until high technology was applied to these gulls in the last 15 years, as reported by Iain Stenhouse and by Mark Mallory in parallel research efforts.  See the images below from their various papers...

Iain Stenhouse, 2011

https://www.academia.edu/1188107/Trans_equatorial_migration_staging_sites_and_wintering_area_of_Sabines_Gulls_Larus_sabini_in_the_Atlantic_Ocean?auto=download&email_work_card=download-paper

Mark Mallory, 

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166043

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166043.g002

To learn more about this please follow the internet links above. 

And follow this link to learn more about light level geolocators...

Light level geolocator:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_level_geolocator