Tracking TERF07/Arctic Gal

[JudyB]

Please read about pingos, ice dome hills, and Pingo National Landmark. This is a special place.
Wildlife in this part of the Arctic include grizzly and polar bear, 2 species of fox, Arctic ground squirrel. Birds include Brant geese, Tundra swan, loons, greater white-fronted geese, snow geese, eiders, green-winged teal, long-tailed duck and gulls. (Wikipedia for Pingo Canadian Landmark). No mention of fish, and we know to add Bald Eagle

Catching up on some things - and what a wonderful area Arctic Gal has been exploring! Thanks for posting about this, Lynne!

[Lynne]

August 25th - tracker update! Arctic Gal continues in area

[Lynne]

August 27th tracker update
August 26 at 11:00am - Arctic Gal at shore of Beaufort Sea
5:01pm - southeast in the flood plain
August 27th - 11:00am -a little east to far side of largish pond

[Lynne]

August 28th update
11:00am - Arctic Gal continues near same area of flood plain

[Lynne]

September 21st - Autumn equinox update for Arctic Gal

[JudyB]

March 15, 2023

I'm afraid we don't have any additional data from TERF07/Arctic Gal yet, and it think it's likely that her tracker failed, though there's a chance that she spent the winter far from cell towers, or that she was/is far enough north that her tracker wasn't recharging enough during the short winter days for it to transmit.

And it is possible that something happened to her, though that seems less likely. She was in an area that she knows well, and was flying reasonable distances in the days before the transmitter stopped uploading data.

We do now have some photos of her - three from when she got her tracker and the fourth is amazing - they are in the first two posts starting here. The third post now has a summary of her travels through September 21, 2022, when she last "called home." And the fourth post is reserved in the hopes her summary will have a part 2.

[Lynne]

May 5th morning tracker update shows Arctic Gal checked in
May 4th 5:01pm - she's hanging out around the Whitehorse Municipal Landfill, Yukon
- she's been farther south and there are more data points for her journey since September -

[JudyB]

Hooray!!!

So wonderful to see Arctic Gal checking in - and it looks as if she's been recording her travels even though she hadn't uploaded any data since September - I'll be interested to discover where she's been for the past seven months.

[Lynne]

Hooray!!!

So wonderful to see Arctic Gal checking in - and it looks as if she's been recording her travels even though she hadn't uploaded any data since September - I'll be interested to discover where she's been for the past seven months.

She has been recording her travels. Lots of data from her start south in October through to now

[JudyB]

I am curious, so I'm going to try for a quick overview of Arctic Gal's travels since September 21st.


She was heading northeast on September 21st, and we suspected she was heading for one of the the places she visited frequently - and now we know that she stayed in that general area through September 29.

She began heading south the next day at a leisurely pace. Not especially visible on the map, but the border between the Northwest Territories where she spent the summer and early fall and Yukon is the dotted line below Fort McPherson, and she crossed that between October 5 and 6 (the red dot shows where she was on the day highlighted on the calendar).

By October 11th she was near Forty Mile, Yukon. I am a bit curious about the towns of Eagle and Chicken, Alaska, on the other side of the vertical blue line that's the international border. The date at the top of the map corresponds to the red dot.

[JudyB]

Continuing....

Here's a wider view of the same spot - she's almost halfway to her winter territory.

She connected up with her path from the previous year around October 15

And by October 23rd, she had crossed over to the Alaskan Panhandle, down the coast a bit from Yakutat, the same as she did the previous year (slightly earlier this year).

[JudyB]

She headed up the coast towards Yakutat to the place past Harlequin Lake where she was last year, and stayed there from October 25 through November 30th.

Note: If anyone reading this knows more about the area, we'd love to know what the attraction is - switching to satellite view, it doesn't look that different to my non-eagle eyes than the rest of the coastline - but obviously there's something that draws her back.

Starting December 1st, she made her way down the coast and coastal islands, arriving in the area near Revilliagigedo Island and Prince of Wales Island on December 20, 2022.

[JudyB]

Continuing....

TERF07/Arctic Gal stayed in the general area with all the red lines from December 20, 2022, to April 18, 2023.

Zoomed in a bit more on the area:

An interesting footnote - TERF07 received her tracker at the Landfill in Vancouver, BC, in December 2020 and staying in that general area through February 24, 2021, at which point she started heading north, crossing over to the Alaskan Panhandle on March 7, 2021. After spending a couple of weeks in Alaska, she went back to BC for a couple of weeks in early spring 2021, crossing back into Alaska on April 12th. And she's spent very little time in BC since then, mostly flying across the little corner between Alaska and the Yukon. She did venture a little ways into BC this spring, arriving on Dundas Island on February 22nd, then heading towards Georgetown Mills (the mapping program draws straight lines between data points, but eagles don't necessarily fly that way, so she may actually have gotten a bit closer to Prince Rupert than it looks), and ending up back on the border with Alaska at 4 pm pacific time on the 24th. (Note - the time on the maps is displayed in the viewer's local time - and I'm in the eastern time zone so 19:00/7pm eastern is 4 pm pacific).

[JudyB]

Continuing....

She then headed up the Panhandle, spending April 19-22 just north of Wrangell, then pausing again a bit east of Juneau April 25 - 29, and reaching Haines, just below Skagway, on May 3rd.

On May 4th, she was in Whitehorse, Yukon, after flying over a little corner of BC between Alaska and the Yukon.

And that's where she was finally able to upload all the data she'd been saving for the past 7 months - and where she still was as of her data upload yesterday. As you can see from the map, it's a regular stopping point for her as she heads north. Looking back on the Summary of Travels on the first page (link), she was there from April 23 to 25 in 2021, and was also there April 19-22 last year - so she seems to be heading north a little later this year.

[Lynne]

She headed up the coast towards Yakutat to the place past Harlequin Lake where she was last year, and stayed there from October 25 through November 30th.

20230507_013.jpg


Note: If anyone reading this knows more about the area, we'd love to know what the attraction is - switching to satellite view, it doesn't look that different to my non-eagle eyes than the rest of the coastline - but obviously there's something that draws her back.

Judy, I'd love to know more about this area as well. From what I gathered so far the big attraction is what David tells us: salmon, salmon, salmon. Arctic Gal seems to find it worth stopping there.