Lazara

Alpha Flag Code:

HX

Capture date:

Spring 2016

RECAPTURE DATE:

May 25, 2017

Sex:

Female

Location:

The Nature Conservancy’s Flat Ranch Preserve near Island Park, ID

Namesake:

We originally started tracking Lazara in 2016, but her transmitter stopped working after sending locations from the middle of the ocean in the Gulf of California. We assumed she was dead! The IBO Curlew Crew and folks from The Flat Ranch Preserve named her Lazara, after the biblical Lazarus, because of her mysterious reappearance in 2017.

“Will the real Henrietta please stand up??”

Biologists arrived one crisp morning in May on The Nature Conservancy’s  Flat Ranch in eastern ID in hopes to find Henrietta, a female curlew we transmittered in 2014. After gaining 3 years of valuable data from her transmitter, we wanted to trap her once more, take OFF the transmitter and give her a huge thank you for being an ambassador for her species. After discovering a female wearing a transmitter on a nest in the same area Henrietta was seen in the night before, we headed towards her with intense anticipation. Once the curlew was trapped and taken from the net- our anticipation turned to complete surprise! It was not Henrietta that we had taken out of the net, it was a previously un-named bird with leg flag ‘HX’- a bird that we had placed a transmitter on in 2016!

HX’s (now named Lazara) transmitter stopped sending signals just months after being placed on her and we feared the worst. Not only were we ecstatic to know that she was indeed alive, but then we were able to replace her faulty transmitter and send her on her way!

But WAIT! What about the “real” Henrietta? Were we able to trap her to take off the transmitter? Visit her profile page to read Henrietta’s story.