D27 is on the move! She flew 312.8 miles SE between August 8th and August 12th, moving with some urgency (Brett’s words) from Magiss to Buckingham Lake.
Broken down by day, her journey looks like this:
8/8/2018 | 114.7 miles | 14 hours and 58 minutes
8/9/2018 | 71.6 miles | 3 hours
8/10/2018 | 4.3 miles | N/A
8/11/2018 | 89.2 miles | 6 hours
8/12/2018 | 33 miles | 6 hours
She traveled for a total of roughly 30 hours, giving her an average speed of a little over 10 miles per hour. Her average speed per day was about 7 miles per hour on August 8, 23 miles per hour on August 9, about 15 miles per hour on August 11, and 5.5 miles per hour on August 10. Her longest day was August 8. She started flying at 8:27AM CT and didn’t stop until sometime shortly before 11:25PM CT. That’s a long day! Note that the days (as defined by daylight length) are still pretty long at this latitude. True night doesn’t start until 11:36PM and lasts for just three hours and ten minutes.
So what was going on? As we mentioned in our last post, she may have been fleeing fire and smoke from fires in California, British Columbia, and western Ontario. Air quality alerts were issued for the areas she traveled through on August 8 and 9, and her flights on August 8 and August 9 indicate (as Brett put it) some urgency. I haven’t yet been able to get archived satellite maps of the area for those two days, but NASA has a fire and smoke section that is both fascinating and disturbing. Check it out here: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/fires/main/index.html.
As always, thanks to Brett and the staff of Eagle Valley for sharing their maps and data with us. You can follow the travels of all the eagles we’ve tracked on our interactive map at: https://www.raptorresource.org/learning-tools/eagle-map/. Stay safe, D27 – and please check in soon!
The Raptor Resource Project