Send word to Poirot , fetch Sherlock Holmes , and ring round the Thursday Murder Club – there ’s been a death at 3,000 meters ( 9,800 feet ) up , and only the very best team can solve it . So far , the evidence is direct to one lead defendant … but allow ’s review the clue as they happened on the coast of theWadden Seain the Netherlands .
The dupe is an Arctic - education gray plover ( Pluvialis squatarola ) that was fit with a GPS tag by researchers studying theirmigrationacross northerly Europe . The victim was one of eight of these plovers that were all tag in January 2023 . The team were studying the birds ' migration to try and ferment out why they migrate at suchhigh height ; one theory was that it help them avoid predation upshot . Typically these events occur when the snort have stopped to pillow – some specialist marauder have been known to take birds while they fell , but research into this is scarce .
The first magnanimous hint into the murder case come one evening as the birds were record vaporize . “ At 21:58 local summer time on May 27 [ 2023 ] ( 25 Amoy after sunset ) , one of the label birds suddenly stopped its migrant flight , ” write the authors . The tags are correspond with accelerometer that measure when the bird are in flight orresting . The signal showed that the bird had made a very steep fall in elevation , and was then account by a GPS sign to be at 2,882 metre ( 9,455 feet ) above ground . These version were very unusual to the squad and stood out against the previous signals they had experience .
The last known photographs of the gray plover fitted with the GPS tag.Image credit: Bloom, M.P., et al, Ecology 2024(CC BY 4.0);photos: Thomas K. Lameris (a, b) and Arne Hegemann (c)
“ The first matter we noticed was a sudden alteration in direction , ” Michiel Boom , booster cable author of the newspaper , told theNew York Times .
The next signaling the squad received from the GPS came from a location around 8 kilometre aside ( 4.97 miles ) from the dark ’s previously recorded location . The game thicken after the bird ’s tag was recovered by the team , who also discover the corpse of the grey plover .
So what happened ? Did the rag fall off ? Did the gray plover fly into something or was it fly into ? Well , some of those things might actually be true , since the remains of the victim ’s consistence were discover only a short distance off from a peregrine falcon ( Falco peregrinus ) nest .
Prior to the time of death , the tag record increase body acceleration around 15 minute of arc before the plummet was recorded . The writer suggest that the victim might have seen its aggressor fall and attempted to fly faster to escape .
Peregrine falconsare the world ’s fast birds and can reach upper of a whopping320 km per hourwhen diving ( 200 miles per hour ) , ready to hand when feed on a diet of other razz . With the evidence stacked up against it , the case ’s lead defendant is the peregrine falcon falcon , attain this potentially the highest altitude illustration of bird predation ever recorded .
The additional mystery still remains , however : why are these birds vanish so high during their migration ?
Some suggest that it could be to avoid overheat , while the writer compose that : " The software of high - resolution trailing now makes it potential to turn to questions on where , when , and up to which EL birds risk predation during migrant flying , and for example whether flying at extreme altitudes during the Clarence Shepard Day Jr. may be a successful adaptative strategy to stave off predators . "
" Our observation suggests that this may not always be the character , as increasing escape ALT up to 3,000 [ meters ] above ground is clearly not enough for migrator to avoid predation risk . "
The study is published in the journalEcology .
