Landfill Falcon Missing

[The Peregrine Chick]

I see. I never really thought about the old technology but it makes sense. I have a question TPC - are Sakars or Saqrs (whatever the proper spelling is) considered to be endangered here in North America?

Sakers are not North American birds so they don't have status here.  They are native to Europe and Asia and in 2010 they were upgraded to endangered.

Wikipedia - Saker Falcon - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saker_Falcon
BirdLife - http://www.birdlife.org/datazone/speciesfactsheet.php?id=3619  (check out the map)
European Raptors - http://www.europeanraptors.org/raptors/saker_falcon.html

[birdcamfan]

I see. I never really thought about the old technology but it makes sense. I have a question TPC - are Sakars or Saqrs (whatever the proper spelling is) considered to be endangered here in North America?

[The Peregrine Chick]

I wondered about that too. They reported in the news story that he was wearing a transmitter and I thought that that should make things easy. Maybe it isn't functional.

Not our kind of transmitter, satellite time is much too expensive for a private owner to be able to afford.  To get a signal, you need to be relatively close to the bird to get the signal and then you need to follow it - the stronger the signal, he closer you are to the bird.  Think about all the wildlife shows you watched as kids where the biologists were using what looked like a radio antennae and listening to beeps - that's more the kind of thing.

[RCF]

Here is some information on the Saker falcon

http://www.arkive.org/saker-falcon/falco-cherrug/image-G20137.html

The saker falcon has undergone a rapid decline in recent years, particularly in the Middle East and Asia due to trapping for the falconry trade, and now faces the very real threat of extinction.

 The saker falcon is a wide-ranging species with a breeding distribution across the Palaearctic region from Eastern Europe to western China. After the breeding season, many populations migrate further south and spend winter in China, India, the Mediterranean, Middle East, and parts of Africa.

The saker falcon has undergone a rapid decline in recent years, particularly in the Middle East and Asia due to trapping for the falconry trade, and now faces the very real threat of extinction . Of those captured for the falconry trade, the vast majority are thought to be young females, creating a major age and sex bias in the wild population that dramatically reduces its breeding potential.

[birdcamfan]

I wondered about that too. They reported in the news story that he was wearing a transmitter and I thought that that should make things easy. Maybe it isn't functional.

[Jo]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/story/2012/07/20/mb-falcon-missing-120720.html

I wasn't sure where to post this. I had no idea that there were falcons "working" at the land fill site.

Hopefully they'll find Arlington. The article mentions that he has a transmitter - could that not be used to track him?