Saving wildlife: Using geology to track elusive hawks

Date:  November 7, 2018

Source:  University of Cincinnati

Researchers at the University of Cincinnati are perfecting an innovative way to track the migration of elusive wildlife to help in their conservation.

UC professor Brooke Crowley studies feathers plucked from hawks captured for leg-banding in Idaho. Cooper's hawks and sharp-shinned hawks are small, predatory raptors that live across North America. They can be difficult to study because of their secretive natures.

"They're hard to find. They're cryptic birds that are solitary. They're quiet. They hide," Crowley said.

Crowley, an associate professor of geology and anthropology, is no stranger to her research subjects. Her father is a lifelong falconer who worked with these small hawks when she was growing up in Colorado.

"Cooper's hawks are like little dinosaurs. They're pretty vicious," she said.

Traditionally, biologists studied birds by placing numbered bands on their legs and recapturing them. Because they are so wide-ranging, few banded birds are ever caught twice. More recently, biologists have used satellite telemetry or transmitters that record the sunrise and sunset to track migration around the world.

But UC's approach can do something these other tools can't: pin down where birds hatched. And this could help wildlife conservationists identify the most important habitat for the birds' long-term survival.

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