Bugged backpack for Brazilian birds

1st October 2019

Purple martins will soon begin their yearly winter migration but this time they’ve got a new accessory. The birds will be wearing little backpacks that will track their roosting sites.

As the bird travels north from Brazil, the purple martin roosts in small forested patches on their rout to North America.

“This is highly unusual behavior for songbirds, which typically roost in heavily forested areas,” said Auriel Fournier, a co-author of the study with University of Manitoba biological sciences professor Kevin Fraser, who led the research. Fournier is the director of the Forbes Biological Station at the Illinois Natural History Survey.

“It’s surprising to see them roosting in these forest islands, which are small, isolated clusters of trees typically surrounded by agriculture, water or recently cut forest,” Fournier said.

The research is intended to determine whether the birds are responding to a change in the environment or whether their roosting behaviour has always been this way.

“We believe they must be intentionally seeking out the forest islands,” Fournier said. “Because these habitats don’t occur very frequently on the landscape, the birds’ use of them is unlikely to be by chance.”

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Using artificial intelligence to track birds' dark-of-night migrations

In a first, UMass Amherst, Cornell use AI to mine big migration data on massive scale

Date: August 28, 2019

Source: University of Massachusetts at Amherst

On many evenings during spring and fall migration, tens of millions of birds take flight at sunset and pass over our heads, unseen in the night sky. Though these flights have been recorded for decades by the National Weather Services' network of constantly scanning weather radars, until recently these data have been mostly out of reach for bird researchers.

That's because the sheer magnitude of information and lack of tools to analyze it made only limited studies possible, says artificial intelligence (AI) researcher Dan Sheldon at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Ornithologists and ecologists with the time and expertise to analyze individual radar images could clearly see patterns that allowed them to discriminate precipitation from birds and study migration, he adds. But the massive amount of information ¬- over 200 million images and hundreds of terabytes of data -- significantly limited their ability to sample enough nights, over enough years and in enough locations to be useful in characterizing, let alone tracking, seasonal, continent-wide migrations, he explains.

Clearly, a machine learning system was needed, Sheldon notes, "to remove the rain and keep the birds."

Now, with colleagues from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and others, senior authors Sheldon and Subhransu Maji and lead author Tsung-Yu Lin at UMass's College of Information and Computer Sciences unveil their new tool "MistNet." In Sheldon's words, it's the "latest and greatest in machine learning" to extract bird data from the radar record and to take advantage of the treasure trove of bird migration information in the decades-long radar data archives. The tool's name refers to the fine, almost invisible, "mist nets" that ornithologists use to capture migratory songbirds.

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Regent honeyeaters' mysterious journey to be tracked with cutting-edge tech

ABC Goulburn Murray 

By Erin Somerville

Posted Sun at 8:06am

When Leslie Kelly heard an unusual bird call in her western Sydney garden, it was a delightful surprise to find it coming from a critically endangered bird released hundreds of kilometres away.

Key points:

Three hundred birds have been part of the regent honeyeater captive release program, but researchers are still unsure of the path the birds are taking

Bird 'backpacks' with satellite tracking tech weighing just two grams are about to be deployed

Researchers needed to wait for transmitter technology to develop to fit a bird which weighs between 35 to 50 grams

The sighting of a male regent honeyeater earlier this month, nestled among backyard grevillea and callistemon at Oxley Park, is another promising sign of recovery for the species being closely watched following a captive release program in north-east Victoria.

A photo of the Oxley Park bird capturing banding on its legs shows it had travelled at least 463 kilometres since its 2017 release in the Chiltern-Mount Pilot National Park.

This bird now boasts the fourth longest movement recorded for the captive release program, of which over 300 birds have been part of.

But researchers are still unsure of the path these small birds are taking to achieve such long journeys.

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Tiny song bird makes record migration, U of G study proves

By Staff Reporter

Mar 20, 2019 08:07 AM EDT

Blackpoll warbler wearing tiny 'backpack.'

It's an epic journey for a tiny bird.

For the first time, University of Guelph biologists have tracked an annual migration of up to 20,000 kilometres made by the 12-gram blackpoll warbler, one of the fastest declining songbirds in North America.

The bird's trek between its breeding grounds in the central and western boreal forest of North America and its winter home in the Amazon Basin - one of the longest songbird migrations recorded -- is the topic of a new paper by a research team headed by U of G biologist Ryan Norris.

The paper was published today in the journal Ecology.

Describing a "great circle route" arcing across North America and including a transoceanic flight to South America, the study confirms an epic migration journey that scientists had long suspected but not yet proved.

In 2015, Norris and other biologists were the first to show that blackpolls breeding in the Maritimes and New England complete a non-stop transoceanic flight of up to three days and about 2,700 km along the eastern coast of the United States.

For this new study, they looked at the full migration of birds from central and western breeding populations.

"It's amazing," said Norris, who worked on the study with Hilary Cooke, associate conservation scientist with Wildlife Conservation Society Canada. "A bird weighing a couple of loonies travels from the western edge of North America all the way to the Amazon basin - and, in between, traverses the Atlantic Ocean."

Other co-authors were integrative biology professor Amy Newman and U of G grad students Bradley Woodworth, Nikole Freeman and Alex Sutton, as well as researchers from other universities, conservation groups and national parks in Canada, the U.S. and Australia.

For the study, researchers tracked birds outfitted with tiny geolocators from four boreal forest sites across northern Canada and Alaska.

Total southward migration took about 60 days on average over distances ranging from 6,900 km for birds breeding in Churchill, Manitoba, to 10,700 km for populations on the western edge of the continent in Nome, Alaska.

Blackpolls from Nome took 18 days to fly across North America to the Atlantic coast of the Carolinas. There, the birds spent almost a month fattening up to double their body weight before a non-stop, 2 ½-day flight across open water to overwintering grounds in northern Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil.

They covered between 2,250 and 3,400 km for that transoceanic hop.

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Drones deployed to track Critically Endangered Australian parrot

06/12/2018

A new study has demonstrated how the use of robotics can become a key tool in the conservation of threatened species.

Swift Parrot is one of Australia's most threatened birds and is in need of urgent help, with BirdLife International estimating a total wild population of between 1,000 and 3,000 individuals. It breeds in Tasmania, migrating to south-east Australia for the austral winter, where it can be found sporadically from New South Wales west to Adelaide.

In 2010, Loro Parque Fundación started funding crucial field research by scientists of the Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University (ANU), triggered by the accelerating decline of the wild population, which has been classified as Critically Endangered since 2015.

What they discovered was alarming. They found that Swift Parrots prefer to nest in cavities with specific characteristics, and that only 5.2 per cent of available tree hollows were suitable in the Tasmanian forests. Worse still, they detected a high level of nocturnal predation on the contents of Swift Parrot nests, including adult females, by Sugar Gliders, a mammal species introduced to Tasmania from mainland Australia.

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Tiny tech tracks hummingbirds at urban feeders

December 12, 2018, UC Davis

Beep" is not a sound you expect to hear coming from a hummingbird feeder. Yet "beeps" abounded during a study led by the University of California, Davis to monitor hummingbirds around urban feeders and help answer questions about their behavior and health.

For the study, published today in the journal PLOS ONE, veterinary researchers tagged 230 Anna's and Allen's hummingbirds with passive integrated transponder (PIT) tags and recorded their visits to feeders equipped with radio-frequency identification (RFID) transceivers. This is the same technology animal rescue shelters use when placing microchips under the skin of cats and dogs so they can be tracked if lost.

Similar to when a grocery item is swept across a supermarket scanner, little beeps sounded each time a hummingbird fluttered inside one of the study's feeder stations. This gave researchers around-the-clock information about how often individual hummingbirds visited the feeders and how long they stayed there.

Such information can help explain how hummingbirds interact with each other at feeders, as well as inform veterinarians about potential disease transmission that could occur from such interactions.

In the wild, hummingbird species do not tend to directly interact much with each other. But with urban feeders, that dynamic changes.

Read more at:

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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Head-started Spoon-billed Sandpipers tracked on migration

05/11/2018

Co-ordinated efforts by conservationists, including the hand-rearing of chicks and ringing and tagging of birds, are giving researchers an unprecedented insight into the annual cycle of the Critically Endangered Spoon-billed Sandpiper.

This autumn, a juvenile 'Spoonie', which was reared by a WWT conservationist in Russia as part of the organisation's long-standing 'head-starting' programme, was re-sighted by a colleague 5,000 km away in Jiangsu, China.

The young bird, known as 'White 4H' after the colour and code on its left flag, was raised in Russia in August by aviculturalist Jodie Clements. Then, a month after being released into the wild, Kane Brides observed the bird in the field in China, while monitoring shorebirds at a key site along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. Accompanied by an international team of conservationists from the UK, New Zealand, Hong Kong and China, they caught a total of 15 Spoon-billed Sandpipers and observed 100 of the Critically Endangered waders among a large mixed-species flock, with White 4H being one of them. Kane said: "I can't believe we came across White 4H which my mate Jodie had helped care for four weeks earlier, in a completely different country. It's like finding a message in a bottle!"

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Meet the “strange white man looking for birds”

James Rawdon is a licensed bird ringer – he captures birds to help identify and track them.

May 25, 2018

Ballito’s James Rawdon has a passion for birds which he recently carried all the way to Sierra Leone.

Rawdon is a licensed bird ringer – he captures birds to help identify and track them.

He was invited to Sierra Leone by the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary on the outskirts of Freetown in the Western Area Peninsula National Park.

Initially established to enforce wildlife laws plus rescue and rehabilitate orphaned chimpanzees, Tacugama has grown into a diverse conservation organisation.

“The aim of the trip was to identify as many bird species as possible in the three areas Tacugama operates in, with the additional method of bird ringing included,” Rawdon explained.

“Unfortunately, there was no final result in the presidential elections in March. This disappointingly meant being advised not to travel to Jaibui Island on the Moa River, which was to be the most productive birding site as well as shortening my trip by five days.

“The trip was however a great success with regards the community outreach and environmental education aspects.”

Rawdon said bird ringing allowed you to see the birds up close and offered a wonderful opportunity to teach children and adults about birds, conservation and the preservation of their natural resources.

Read on  

Otago penguin's odyssey reaches Cook Strait

Friday, 16 March 2018

A young Otago yellow-eyed penguin's amazing odyssey has continued as the bird, dubbed Takaraha, reached the Cook Strait last night.

The bird's unusual course has continued and unlike other penguins being tracked by University of Otago researchers, Takaraha has shown no interest in staying close to home.

As of last night the bird had travelled almost 1000km.

After reaching just south of Kaikoura earlier this week, by last night Takaraha had reached the Cook Strait, and based on tracking data appeared to show an interest in crossing it, before doubling back and heading towards the top of the South Island.

As of last night Takaraha’s position was 11 nautical miles due east of the Wairau River Mouth, near Blenheim.

Tracking data showed the bird had travelled 954km and 665km from her Otago home, as the crow flies.

The Catlins-born juvenile is one of 23 yellow-eyed penguins university researchers have fitted with 25g to 40g transmitters so they can be tracked while on their ''OE''.

But unlike the 14 other yellow-eyed penguins that have already left for open water for the first time - and have stayed in North Otago or South Canterbury waters - Takaraha does not appear to be looking back.

Earlier this week, the bird was well over 500km away from home, near Goose Bay, south of Kaikoura, zoology PhD candidate Mel Young said.

''The other ones have had short, sharp movements which suggest that they've found some good food and have stayed put foraging, but Takaraha is beelining it up the East Coast,'' she said.

The remaining eight trackable birds would were expected to fledge from yesterday afternoon.

Read on  

Scientists are using sound to track nighttime bird migration

Last Updated by Adam Wernick on Aug 02, 2016 at 2:44 pm 

A group of researchers at New York University and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology are helping to track the nighttime migratory patterns of birds by teaching a computer to recognize their flight calls.

The technique, called acoustic monitoring, has existed for some time, but the development of advanced computer algorithms may provide researchers with better information than they have gathered in the past.

“We want to make as many different kinds of measurements as we can,” says Andrew Farnsworth, of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “The intro point to go from human to computer is about thinking of these sounds in terms of frequency and time, and figuring out how to measure that in increasing detail and feed that information into the machine’s listening models.”

“On the sensors, there is a spectral template detector that scans the audio as it comes in, checking for potential matches,” explains Justin Solomon of NYU, one of the collaborators on the project. “When a potential match is identified, it snaps roughly one second of that audio centered around the detection and sends that through the server.”

Flight calls are distinct from birdsong. Birdsong is made up of many different notes strung together. Flight calls are single notes, almost exclusively less than one hundred milliseconds long. The researchers ‘teach’ the machine to recognize these calls by giving it a large collection of recordings.

Then they use what's called ‘unsupervised feature learning,’ which means that they don't tell the algorithm what to look for. Rather, by giving it a large number of examples, the computer builds a statistical model of the specific patterns that are representative of a certain species.

The eventual goal is to be able to put names to these nocturnally-migrating species and do it in an automated way in real time, in order to understand the biology — the acoustic communication — and apply it to conservation.

Right now, scientists use two sources of information when trying to understand migratory patterns. The first is bird watchers — many people watching birds all across the country. Cornell has been good at gathering information from citizen scientists who help categorize the occurrence of certain species by location and time. But those observations are mostly made by day, and migrations often occur at night.

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Goose camp: Tracking troubled birds

Date:April 28, 2016

Source:University of Delaware

Summary:A research team is studying the Atlantic brant goose in Canada’s Hudson Bay region. The bird's population has been on a moderate decline, and the team is looking to seen if limitations during the summer breeding season have accelerated that trend.

When the University of Delaware's Chris Williams traveled to Southampton Island in Canada's north Hudson Bay in the summer of 2015 to study the nesting sites of the Atlantic brant goose, the last thing he and his research group expected to run into was a fellow Mid-Atlantic resident. But as he scoured the scenery one day, he found someone else who made the trip in the form of a red knot.

Red knots are shorebirds that come north through the Delaware Bay on their trip from South America to the Arctic, eating horseshoe crabs to refuel on their trip.

Williams said he was pleased to get a photograph of the bird, which had a leg flag markings J7V that was last re-sighted in 2010 and 2011 around Cape May, New Jersey.

"It was fantastic to run into this little bird that had made the long trip north just like us," said Williams, associate professor of wildlife ecology who oversees a Waterfowl and Upland Gamebird research program in UD's College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Brant in decline

The focus of the research team, which includes UD graduate student Clark Nissley, was on the Atlantic brant goose, a bird whose population has been fluctuating and on a moderate decline for many years, to learn if limitations during the summer breeding season have accelerated that trend.

The brant has a number of factors working against it, beginning with its size. Because the brant is smaller than the other two birds that nest in the area -- snow geese and cackling geese -- it is at a disadvantage when competing for habitat and food.

Also due to its size disadvantage, the brant arrives at its breeding grounds later than the other geese, which can build up larger fat reserves prior to make the trip north, enabling them to make fewer stops to the Arctic nesting grounds. The smaller brant, on the other hand, must stop more along the way in order to feed and rebuild its fat stores. Because of these delays, the brant arrive about 1-2 weeks after lesser snow geese and cackling geese causing them to miss out on prime nesting real estate.

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Barn Swallow Bird Migration Tracked with New Tech Techniques

Catherine Griffin

First Posted: Dec 31, 2015 12:18 PM EST

Scientists may be getting some new insight into bird migration by combining new techniques. Scientists have produced more refined estimates of where individual Barn Swallows spend the winter by using methods to both track large numbers and a handful of birds.

Barn Swallows breed in North America, but head south for the winter to a broad area that encompasses most of Central America, the Caribbean and South America. In this latest study, researchers wanted to find a better way to determine where within thisrange Barn Swallows were spending their winter months.

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Lesser noddy bird that only breeds off WA coast tracked with tiny GPS device in hopes for greater conservation

By Sarah Taillier

Updated Fri at 6:41am

A species of threatened bird living on iconic islands off Western Australia's coast has become the lightest seabird in the world to ever be tracked, an ecologist says.

Small, waterproof GPS devices were fitted to 18 lesser noddy birds, a species that is only known to breed on three islands within the Houtman Abrolhos, a network of islands about 80 kilometres off the coast of Geraldton.

The birds weigh about 100 grams.

Data from the GPS devices revealed the threatened birds were travelling more than 100 kilometres from the islands, for up to 17 hours at a time, to gather food from unprotected waters.

Ecologist Chris Surman has studied the threatened seabirds for 25 years and said the data highlighted some of the birds' feeding zones.

"What we're hoping to do is build up a picture and find these vulnerable sorts of hot spots for these birds that are away from the islands," Dr Surman said.

"So when you do conservation work, you can easily target where the birds are breeding and look at what sort of habitats to set aside through conservation reserves."

Read on ...

How tracking one turtle dove could help save its whole species

Published by surfbirds on August 12, 2015 courtesy of BirdLife International, surfbirds archive

In a first for UK science, a European Turtle dove (Streptopelia turtur) has been tracked by satellite tagging as it travelled 11,200km from Suffolk in England to Mali, Africa, and back again.

Flying mostly under the cover of darkness, the bird, named Titan, flew 500-700 kilometres a night across epic landscapes such as the Atlas Mountains of North Africa, Sahara Desert and the Gulf of Cádiz, visiting Senegal, Morocco and Spain en route. His maximum speed was 60km per hour.

Titan was fitted with a small, lightweight satellite tag in Suffolk in summer 2014 by the RSPB Centre for Conservation Science. Since then, Titan is playing a vital role in solving a serious conservation problem: how to prevent the rapid loss of his species from across Europe.

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Tracking tiny songbirds across continents

Date:April 29, 2015

Source:Central Ornithology Publication Office

Summary:A pair of newly published papers lay out a method for outfitting birds with geolocators or radio transmitters that cuts precious weight from the package, allowing the devices to be used on very small birds, and demonstrate that the trackers do not harm the birds or impede their migration.

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Study tracking where bird migration paths could cross offshore wind zone

Bird watchers know where sea ducks like the surf scoter breed — across Canada and Alaska — and exactly where they devote their winters — along the U.S. coasts, in bodies of water like the Chesapeake and Delaware bays. Exactly where they go in among is a bit of a mystery.

But with wind turbines possibly dotting the horizon off of Ocean City beaches by the finish of the decade, potentially developing a new obstacle on the birds' migration routes, answers are needed.

Teams have spent three years in waters from Long Island to the Carolinas in search of surf scoters and two other sorts of sea birds, capturing them and releasing them with tracking devices. Scientists completed their tagging final month and have begun collecting information on their movement patterns, planning to continue following the birds as extended as attainable.

The study aims to additional clearly map the routes the birds take involving seasons, and to learn whether or not they cross a 125-square-mile zone established for possible wind farms. Early information suggests the birds keep closer to the coast than the wind farm zones, but a lot more nonetheless requires to be learned about how the turbines could impact wildlife, scientists stated.

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Bar-headed geese: Highest bird migration tracked

15 January 2015 Last updated at 19:02

By Victoria Gill

Science reporter, BBC News

A tracking study has revealed the secrets of the world's highest bird migration - the Himalayan flight of the bar-headed goose.

The geese have been recorded at heights of more than 7,000m (23,000ft).

Now, a team led by researchers from Bangor University has tracked the flight and revealed the basis for the birds' "rollercoaster flight" pattern.

The findings, published in Science, show how the birds hug the mountainous terrain, and that this saves energy.

Bar-headed geese have fascinated biologists for decades.

They achieve physiological feats that seem impossible - flying at extreme altitude, where there is less than 10% the oxygen found at sea level.

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Chris the Cuckoo clocks up 60,000 miles

Since being fitted with a satellite tag by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) four years ago, Chris, a Cuckoo named after naturalist and TV presenter Chris Packham, has travelled over 60,000 miles – the equivalent of flying twice round the world. And in his journeys he’s taken in 22 different countries!

The UK’s Cuckoo population has dropped by 72 per cent in the last 25 years. In order to find out what’s driving this decline, the BTO fitted an original five Cuckoos with state of the art tags to enable them to follow the birds as they made their way out of Britain to Africa for the winter. The tags were believed to have a lifespan of two or three years.

Of the first five, Chris is the only Cuckoo still transmitting live data, far exceeding the expectations of the scientists. He is currently in the Congo rainforest, having arrived at his favoured winter spot on 25 October.

Dr Chris Hewson, lead scientist on the project at the BTO, says, “Chris the Cuckoo is a real hero of ornithology. The tag he is carrying has helped us to understand the pressures that he and our Cuckoos face on what is a pretty hazardous migration to Africa.

“He has survived sand storms, hail storms, an exceptionally cold, wet summer, predators over the Mediterranean and in the Congo rainforest, and has crossed the Sahara Desert a whopping seven times since we started following him. We have everything crossed in the hope that he makes it back next spring.”

Chris Packham says, “Chris deserves a medal for what he has given to the understanding of bird migration; he is a truly remarkable bird.

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Bird 'backpacks' put wood thrush migration on the map

Date:

July 23, 2014

Source:

York University

Summary:

Researchers have created the first migratory connectivity map produced for a songbird, using tracking from both breeding and winter sites. They were able to trace the route taken by wood thrushes from North America using bird 'backpacks'. They discovered that wood thrushes from Canada don't migrate to the same areas as their southern neighbors, and actually have a longer migratory route. The map will help identify specific areas for habitat protection.

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