The Basque history of Scolopax rusticola without frontiers1

Mark Kurlanski wrote a very interesting and good book: The Basque History of the World2. In our case, the world is The tracking of the Scolopax rusticola with Radio-Telemetry via Satellite (RTVS). On September 27th, 2009, a nice article appeared in the New York Times: Basque without borders3. In our particular world, it can be translated into Scolopax rusticola without frontiers (SRWF)4. Paraphrasing Kurlanski, this website will be a kind of The Basque History of the SRWF, i.e., the Basque history of the tracking of the Scolopax rusticola with RTVS." All this were very clear to me when, in March 2009, at the Microwave Telemetry Inc.s office (Baltimore, Maryland), I saw the Basque flag (ikurrina) among another 52 flags of different countries. The ikurrina was at MTIs main meeting conference room. So, in Baltimore I decided to write the Basque history of the main steps of that tracking. The history began in 2003. At that time there were no available PTTs for the Eurasian woodcock.
1

See http://scolopaxrusticolawithoutfrontiers.blogspot.com/2010/01/scolopax-rusticola-withoutfrontiers.html. 2 See http://www.basqueed.org/Basque-History.htm. 3 See http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/travel/27basque.html. 4 In Basque: Mugarik gabeko Scolopax rusticola: http://mugarikgabekoscolopaxrusticola.blogspot.com/.

In 2004 most of the information that was available in internet was analyzed. At the end of 2004 we knew that MTI was preparing new solar PTTs of 12 grams. For traditional radio-telemetry tracking, we did know that some woodcocks were equipped with transmitters of 12 grams5. At the beginning of January 2005, we contacted MTI6. On March 1st, 2005, we sent MTI an email with the following decision: (a) We are planning to follow the counter migration of the Scolopax rusticola, starting next March 2006 (b) So, we will need (some) PTT-100 12 gram Solar PTTs to be in our hands by next January, 2006 And so, the Basque History of SRWF began.

See O. Duriezs thesis (2003): Stratgies individuelles d'hivernage chez la bcasse des bois (Scolopax rusticola): compromis nergtiques pour la slection de l'habitat, in http://tel.archivesouvertes.fr/documents/archives0/00/00/35/09/tel-00003509-00/tel-00003509.pd. 6 See Scolopax rusticola without frontiers, for an introduction: http://www.euskonews.com/0522zbk/gaia52202en.html