Banded Black Skimmer Update – Greetings from Sunny Florida

When Liz last wrote about our banded black skimmers in her August blog post, the colony members had just left their breeding grounds on Martha's Vineyard to begin their southward migration. Since that day we have been eagerly awaiting reports of re-sights from observers along their migratory route and wintering grounds. It was a quiet migratory period as only one observation was reported to us between August and November. Eighth-year bird J7 was seen on Figure-Eight Island in North Carolina on September 23rd by Lindsay Addison, a biologist with North Carolina Audubon. But once we reached late November and early December, a flurry of reports from the many dedicated observers on the skimmers' wintering grounds started coming in.

As of December 23rd, four banded skimmers have been reported in Florida this winter:

A map showing the locations of resighted skimmers so far this fall/winter

Three of these banded skimmers (E7, J7, and L6) were seen regularly on Martha's Vineyard throughout the summer, but K2's summer nesting colony location evades us. We have only received winter and spring re-sights of K2, and we suspect this skimmer is nesting in a large colony where its bands are not easily re-sighted. Someday, we hope someone will see K2 during the nesting season and report its bands to the USGS banding lab. For now, we are pleased to know these banded skimmers completed their thousand-mile-plus migration safely, and we are grateful to Bretty Moyer and Ingrid Seigert for reporting these banded birds. Brett reports E7 is part of a flock of 1,000 wintering skimmers, and Ingrid reports 125 skimmers in the Key West flock.

Image at top: A flock of black skimmers resting in front of a docked cruise ship on their wintering grounds in Mallory Square, Key West, FL. Photo by Ingrid Siegert.