By Joe Zimmermann, science writer with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources: In recent summers on Maryland’s “tern raft,” a man-made conservation platform that serves as habitat for state-endangered colonial nesting waterbirds, scientists found a common tern with a distinctive orange tag on its leg. The tag indicated that Argentinian researchers had banded the tern in the winter at Punta Rasa, a coastal area just south of Buenos Aires. That means this common tern—and at least five others there with similar tags—traveled some 5,000 miles between summers spent in waters of Worcester County’s coastal bays and winters deep in the southern hemisphere. Maryland, especially the coastal areas along the Chesapeake Bay, attracts many migrating northern birds during the winter, but that migratory pull goes in both directions. While these common terns are some of the farthest traveled, they’re hardly the only birds that clear out of Maryland for more temperate climes in the colder months. “Migration is very dynamic and changeable by species,” said Dave Brinker, a Maryland Department of Natural Resources avian conservation ecologist who studies bird movement. “They all have their different strategies to make it through the winter.” Some of the birds that leave Maryland are other nesting waterbirds, […]
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