Oregon Public Broadcasting

It’s a long way to fly for lunch.  A tag that was placed in a Columbia River salmon recently showed up in the belly of a seabird in New Zealand.  Correspondent Chris Lehman explains.

Scientists routinely put tracking tags the size of a grain of rice into hatchery-raised salmon.  Now a bird-hunter has turned in a fish tag recovered nearly 8000 miles away in southern New Zealand.

It was found in the stomach of a baby bird known as a sooty shearwater.   John Ferguson is director of NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. He suspects the tag was inside a fish that was eaten by the bird’s mother, and was passed along by regurgitation.

He says sooty shearwater birds are known to spend their summers along the northern Pacific coast.  John Ferguson:  “What is really just scientifically phenomenally interesting is that now we have absolute proof that they’re feeding on Columbia River salmon, and that energy that they absorb from here helps get them back to New Zealand."

Ferguson says northwest fish watchers are curious now to do survey work in New Zealand to see how many more salmon tags from here they can find.

Web Links:Northwest Fisheries Science Center  More information on the sooty shearwater