Since 2013, NHA biologists have collaborated with colleagues from Biodiversity Research Institute (BRI) and Stantec Consulting, Inc. (Stantec) in a multi-year satellite telemetry project to better understand both local and broad-scale movement patterns of PEFAs nesting in rural settings near the Groton Wind Farm located in Groton, NH (DeSorbo et al. 2018, Stantec Consulting et al. 2016). We partnered to refine a method for capturing flighted adults instead of pre-fledged juveniles, resulting in a much lower mortality rate and a much improved chance of generating multiple years of location data. While recently used in Canada (LaPointe et al. 2013) and Russia (Sokolov et al. 2014), the techniques we used to catch and fit transmitters on falcons at their nest sites had not previously been used on PEFAs in the eastern U.S. While we have developed an effective method for capturing adult females with eggs or nestlings, we are still refining our techniques in order to efficiently capture adult males at nests.
Program Report: Determining Local and Broad-scale Movements of Peregrine Falcons (Falco peregrinus) from New Hampshire
