As regular CFZ-watchers will know, for some time Corinna has been doing a column for Animals & Men and a regular segment on On The Track... particularly about out-of-place birds and rare vagrants. There seem to be more and more bird stories from all over the world hitting the news these days so, to make room for them all - and to give them all equal and worthy coverage - she has set up this new blog to cover all things feathery and Fortean.

Wednesday 22 March 2017

Monitoring birds by drone



Forget delivering packages or taking aerial photographs —drones can even count small birds!

A new study, published in The Auk: Ornithological Advances, tests this new approach to wildlife monitoring and concludes that, despite some drawbacks, the method has the potential to become an important tool for ecologists and land managers.

Bird surveys provide crucial data for environmental management but they have limitations: some areas are difficult to access and surveyors vary in their skills at identifying birds. Using audio recordings made by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can help to combat both of these pitfalls, as hard-to-reach sites can be flown over and multiple people can review the resulting recordings.

Andrew Wilson of Gettysburg College and his colleagues tested the feasibility of this approach by using fishing line to suspend an audio recorder from a simple drone, first in trial runs on college athletic fields and then in real bird surveys on Pennsylvania State Game Lands, USA.

The field experiments on state game lands directly compared UAV data with traditional ground-based surveys of the same areas. A few bird species were undercounted by the UAV technique, such as Mourning Doves —which have extremely low-frequency calls that weren't picked up by the recorder —and Grey Catbirds, which occurred at such high densities that counting individual birds in the recordings was difficult. Overall, however, there were few significant differences between the results produced by the two methods.

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