adUlt migrations | 61Malcie Smith, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ Fetlar
warden takes up the story.^9 “We knew through experience that using a
walk- in trap was almost always successful with incubating male phala-
ropes, so I was confident of success and, sure enough, we got our hands
on his tag the following morning. We had a well- deserved dram of Scot-
land’s finest that night!
“There was a bit of a problem with having the data interpreted, with
colleagues from the RSPB and the Swiss Ornithological Institute be-
coming involved in making sense of what was pretty messy data. I re-
member reading emails that included phrases like ‘impossible to inter-
pret’ which was not encouraging. I was eventually given the ‘cleaned up’
details by email which nearly knocked me off my seat.”
The cause of Smith’s unseating was a track that took the bird west
across the Atlantic from Shetland to Newfoundland. It then meandered
along the eastern seaboard of North America, until crossing central
America in mid- September. The next six winter months were spent in
the eastern Pacific close to the Equator between continental Ecuador*
- (^) Appropriately the country’s name means Equator in Spanish.
Birdwatchers were amazed when it was discovered that a tracked
Red- necked Phalarope, breeding in the Shetland Isles,
had spent the winter in the equatorial Pacific.