Migration, by its nature, is a moving target. Despite it being an annual event, researchers and experts still don’t know a lot about the annual bird migrations northwards that happen every year.

“One of the biggest mysteries… is that we don’t know where they die. » – Bridget Stutchbury, professor in Ecology and Conservation at York University.

Currently, conservationists are kind of in the dark. Finding out exact routes could be invaluable for conservation efforts, allowing policy and the creation of protected areas to be planned specifically where they are needed most.

Photograph by Bailey Moreton.

Currently, there are maps drawn up with 4 general migration corridors, but these are quite simplified. Unfortunately, tracking systems have always been too big to be used on small birds such as the wood thrush. 

How will researchers get the information? Well for that, researchers are going tiny.

The Motus Wildlife Tracking System is being used by researchers in Texas to track the dwindling hoary bat population. Relying on a radio signal emitted from a digital nano-tag transmitter attached the bats back, the researchers are able to track the bat by gathering data from everytime a bat passes a radio tracker. This results in a map of their migration.

Stutchbury and her research team are using a different kind of tiny transmitter to track wood thrushes and also purple martins (undergoing assessment for becoming designated a species at risk. This transmitter measures light levels so the researchers can tell when sunrise and sunset was. With this information, they can calculate the location of the birds, and track their migration routes.

“The geolocators we are using now are fabulous. They have opened up a whole new world about what these animals are doing.” – Bridget Stutchbury

The final frontier, and the place conservationists are looking to get a clear view of small bird migration routes.

 

Whilst these transmitters can provide important data and guidance on where conservation efforts should be directed (the coffee farms of Costa Rica and Yucatan Province in Mexico), it does not provide detailed information on how the birds died or where they get lost.

For this, we have to look up, to space. The International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space Initiative (ICARUS) involves tiny satellite trackers beaming up data to the Russian module of the International Space Station (ISS) providing real-time data on the birds’ location.

This will be key in determining where and what conservation efforts should be made, to ensure the best chance of survival for birds and bats alike.

“It’s not like Silent Spring where you can point the finger at DDT and say that’s the problem,” said Stutchbury. “We’re now having such a massive impact…For each species, we need to do a full life-cycle approach to try and identify what is limiting their breeding success, and what’s pushing up their mortality.”

From « The Small Stuff Counts » by Niki Wilson in Canadian Wildlife Magazine. Read more about how tiny transmitters could make a big difference in the conservation of small bird and bat species in Canadian Wildlife magazine, Mar + Apr 2015 edition.

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