Innovations to Help Find Out Where Birds Go

The Lab's Bioacoustics Research Program has received a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation to develop advanced miniaturized radio tags to track birds and other animals. Currently, the smallest tags only transmit signals for about 10—14 days before the battery wears out, making it difficult to track songbirds for long periods.

The new tags will include a tiny computer that can be programmed to turn off when the animal is inactive, extending the precious battery life to months. Researchers tracking birds during migration will be able to place tags on birds in summer and schedule the tags to wake up when the birds are on the move. Specialized tags will help monitor the condition of the animal using temperature sensors or by recording heart rates and sending data summaries remotely. Within the next year, the tags will be used to study cowbirds, macaws, tapirs, jaguars, and migrant shorebirds.

This grant complements a two-year award from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which is funding advances in radio-tracking receivers. The new receivers will implement a variant of the technology that underlies cellular phone networks to track tags automatically over wide areas. The first tracking network will be established at the Los Amigos field station in the Peruvian Amazon.

The new tags will help track Scarlet Macaws.

Photo by John Dunning/CLO

In addition, a grant from the National Science Foundation will fund a collaboration with Zygmunt Haas in Cornell's College of Engineering to extend the range of tracking capability by enabling radio tags to communicate with each other, and relay data back to the receiving stations. Practical realization of this system is a few years away, but we look forward to a day when we receive data from very distant animals, even those that never return to communicate with the receivers directly.

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu