I heard back today from the DEC guy who was directly involved with the CT Hill Grouse project.
He gave me all of the information on the Bird. His name was Larry, he liked long walks on the beach and he had never been kissed.
But, seriously... He said that over the past 3 years they had banded and put transmitters on 15 birds in that WMU. And of those 15, 4 of the transmitters are still giving information. But he said that the transmitters do stop working after a while. The bird I shot was caught and banded in May 2020. It did have a transmitter on it too, but he said it must have fallen off because it stopped moving a month later in June. The bird was caught and banded from the same patch of cover that I shot it from. There was an old foundation next to it, so it was easy to describe and confirm. So it did not move much at all. And he said that they generally do not move much and especially in that WMU because the habitat is so sparse, they found that the birds did not move more than 10-15 acres, even seasonally.
When I cut that bird and other open taken from the same area before hand, they had been eating Hawthorne berries.
The DEC did projects in Hanging Bog as well. They tagged over 25 birds there as he said that the habitat there is much better. He said they got 4 or 5 reports of birds getting shot there. But this is the first call on a bird from CT Hill.
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B. Dudley
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