SCIENCE LAB SPECIAL : DANGEROUS SKIES 2

 

'' That was the first moment where we started to be like, ' Well, that's actually pretty insane,' '' Dr. Boom said.

Other clues pointed toward a high altitude predation event. The data also revealed that the plover sped up in the moments before it changed direction.

It had most likely spotted its attacker and was trying to get away. What's more, upon recovering the ployer's remains and tracking band in Sweden, scientists spotted a peregrine falcon nest a mere 650 feet away. This gave the team a suspect in the murder mystery.

Piecing it together in a study published in the journal Ecology, Dr. Boom and colleagues provided evidence for the highest-flying predation event ever recorded.

Dr. Boom cautioned that kills occurred all the time on the sides of mountains or high-elevation plateaus. But as far as a fight for survival involving predator and prey nearly 10,000 feet up in the sky? That's something rare.

That one of the eight tracked grey plovers was picked off by a predator shows that, even very far up, the sky is a dangerous place.

'' Though it might seem like a random event,  with one plover ending up predated at high altitudes, it underlines what these falcons are capable of, '' said Sissel Sjoberg, a behavioral ecologist at Lund University in Sweden who has documented the migration altitudes of the great snipe and great reed warbler.  

[ Jason Bittel ]