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.
