It’s marked as a “Sanderling.” The original person who deployed this tag thinks this is extremely unlikely. We are very far from the coast (and only have 4 total eBird records for Sanderling in our county). The detections of this tag occur nearly daily all summer and looks like it could be actual bird activity.
I don’t have a handheld receive that can detect this tag frequency.
The deployment timeline (which may show detections on non-registered CTT tags) also shows “detections” of 3 other CTT tags during this same period. The codes all begin with “6134***”, which suggests they are false positives caused by corrupted tag signals – where the tail end of the code is corrupted into something else. One of those tag codes (6134000) is an extremely common corruption of many other actual codes.
This tag was briefly picked up at Sessions Woods the day before October Mountain. Again the same 4 tag codes were associated with it in the deployment timeline.
It definitely appears that a physical tag is present. It could be the tag with the deployment (perhaps it was recovered and this wasn’t recorded) or one of the two other non-registered tags that’s showing up. Of course it could be something else, but that would seem to be the most likely option!
Regardless of whether or not there is a physical tag there, there is also a bug. The “buffered expiration date” was in May 2023. Any detections after this date should not have been displayed on Motus, yet whatever the source of these “detections”, they are still showing up.
I was afraid of this…Dan, that’s my test tag. It was handed off to me in 2021/22 and finally jumped into the high grass on my last maintenance visit. So there is a tag, but it’s not on a Sanderling, or anything, for that matter. I spoke with Josh about having getting the deployment terminated so it stops showing up. My plan is to bring a 434 handheld to try and find the tag on my next visit. Sorry for the confusion.
