Links: Previous map for Felix -- Next map for Felix
'07 Maps for: Claws -- Conomo -- Della -- Homer -- Jaws -- Luke -- Patience
Birds of Prey page -- Osprey main page -- Migration page -- Home Page

	29 Sep -- Felix has crossed the crossed Panama (scroll down for details) and is now sampling the taste of Pacific Ocean fish. This is really rare for East Coast Ospreys. He's only the 3rd tagged Osprey that we know has gotten his talons wet in the Pacific (Ms. Charlotte and Comet are the others).       For some reason we got more fixes for his crossing of the Caribbean than were available when I made the last map. A couple of interesting points come to light here. The first is his change of course shortly after the 9/23 11:00 point on the map. Why did he make this shift from just south by southwest to south by southeast? And then back to his original course? Winds perhaps, but would the winds shift that much and then swing back so quickly?      Right where I've marked the points for 9/23-4 it appears he took a breather on a boat. There's an 12 hour period where he reversed course and headed NW, covering only 15 miles, between 23:00 on the 23rd and 11:00 on the 24th. The next fix, at 12:00 on the 24th has him right back on course for the shores of Nicaragua.       Including the 12 missing hours, he landed in Central America more than 50 hours (we don't know exactly when he landed) after leaving Cuba, having covered 802 miles (1292 km).
	Felix took 3 days on this crossing of Central America. He started out in southeastern Nicaragua, passing into Costa Rica on the afternoon of the 25th. He took care of the rest of Costa Rica on the 26th (he has been starting his migration around 3 or 4 PM) and spent the night of the 26th in northwestern Panama. That afternoon he crossed the mountains and made his way down to the Gulf of Chiriqui, winding up on the Islas Contreras--mere flyspecks on a map of Central America.      Over the three days he covered 339 miles (546 km).      Who knows what he'll do next?! Odds are that he'll move east and head into South America, but this is a bird that obviously didn't read the Migration Instruction Manual. These were the last locations we got from Felix. We don't know if he died or if his transmitter just failed. After his phenomenal crossings of both a good hunk of the Atlantic and a lot of the Caribbean, it's hard to imagine him dying in Panama. Shooting is always a possibility, and we can't rule that out. The optimist in me says we'll stick with the mal-functioning transmitter.

Birds of Prey page -- Osprey main page -- Migration page -- Home Page