I just came across some relatively new papers I had not seen that shared some eye-opening new facts about migratory connectivity in some northern birds. A paper published in 2012 describes the results of a project that placed geo-locators (small devices that record day length information which can be used to calculate geographic location) on Rusty Blackbirds nesting in Alaska. Although only three of the 17 birds with geo-locators were recaptured, those three birds yielded valuable information about the timing and location of migration. All three of the birds crossed over from southcoastal Alaska to the Canadian Prairie Provinces and then moved south to winter in the Midwest U.S. with one wintering south to Louisiana. They followed a similar route back north in spring.

Another paper published in 2012 used the same technology to track where Golden-crowned Sparrows wintering along the central California coast were spending their summers. Researchers they placed geo-locators on 33 birds of which four were recaptured the following year. All four birds had summered along the Gulf Coast of Alaska.

For me the most surprising fact came from yet a third paper on this topic published in 2012, this one about Snow Buntings. The researchers in this case reviewed evidence of migratory connectivity from banding returns, stable isotope analysis, and from placing geo-locators on Snow Buntings breeding in the East Bay Migratory Bird Sanctuary in Nunavut north of Hudson Bay. They found that birds breeding at East Bay migrated west of Hudson Bay and wintered in southern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta and in North Dakota. The results that were most shocking to me though were that many of the Snow Buntings that we see in Maritime Canada and New England are traveling to Greenland for the summer!