By Chris Heward, Wetlands Research Assistant
Could this be the first sign of migration from our satellite-tagged woodcock? Data transmitted on 3rd November shows that Sir John was in Kaliningrad on the Baltic coast, 980 km (610 miles) south-west of his summer breeding site on the shores of Lake Ladoga.
You won’t see this most recent update on the Woodcock Watch website yet. The data we receive is graded by its quality and our map only publishes the most reliable data, which is accurate to 1-10 km. Sir John’s recent transmission falls slightly short of this but is good enough to say that he is somewhere in the Baltic region and certainly no longer near Ladoga.
Often, we find that these ‘low-quality’ fixes are given a lower degree of ‘certainty’, but accompanying ‘high-quality’ data reveals them to be reasonably accurate. It will be interesting to see how Sir John’s next transmission compares.