This is one of a series of blogs about the seven GPS loggers recovered during our most recent Cornish field trip the previous blog can be found here:
This bird’s migration may, on the face of it, seem unimpressive, it has travelled just 1,100 kilometres to northern Germany. It is not the shortest migration we have recorded, a satellite tagged bird tagged on Islay moved due east to Denmark (a journey of just 900 km), but it’s certainly still well below average.
Nevertheless, it still tells us something interesting: it is the only woodcock we’ve ever tagged that has spent the summer in Germany and one of only two that have returned to Central Europe – the other being a bird tagged in County Durham that migrated to Poland. This demonstrates that a very small proportion of our wintering population originate from central Europe, rather than Scandinavia, the Baltic States or Russia.