Bird band makes South Korean stopover
As well as keeping an eye on the welfare of our parks and wildlife in the area, the City Council’s Park Rangers assist with programmes which allow them to learn about the migrants who spend only part of their lives in and around Christchurch. Last summer about 80 bar-tailed godwits were colourbanded on the Avon-Heathcote Estuary, some of which are shown at right. About 70 of those banded birds left on migration in March and one — red.blue/white.yellow — was photographed in South Korea (small picture) three to four weeks after leaving the estuary. It was feeding, building reserves for the second half of its migration up into Siberia and across the Bering Sea to the arctic tundra breeding grounds in Alaska. Council Ranger and ornithologist Andrew Crossland says the small waders fly non-stop across the Pacific Ocean on their way to Christchurch, but, “on the way back it’s a bit more leisurely. They use an island-hopping route from March to May — New Zealand to Australia to South-East Asia and up to North-East Asia, then across to Alaska.”
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