The Lewis’s Woodpecker is likely one of the West’s avian gems. It has a ruby-red face and emerald feathers draped throughout its again like a cape with a silver cowl. In summer season it swoops and circles over woodlands west of the Nice Plains, performing aerial acrobatics because it hunts bugs on the wing. Whereas wintering in forests of the far West and Southwest, it aggressively defends caches of saved nuts from piratical Acorn Woodpeckers. Fascinating as it’s, nonetheless, there may be nonetheless a lot we don’t know in regards to the chook’s actions and biology—or what has pushed its inhabitants to say no by about half because the Sixties.
To determine what’s spurring the losses, scientists at MPG Ranch, a conservation analysis group in western Montana, are monitoring Lewis’s Woodpeckers with a easy and more and more standard know-how. Since 2019 they’ve connected radio transmitters to birds breeding within the Bitterroot Valley. When a tagged chook passes inside a dozen miles of one in every of 13 receiver stations within the 96-mile-long valley, its identification is routinely logged on the antenna location, revealing its actions on its breeding grounds. People tagged within the Bitterroot have additionally pinged monitoring stations in southwestern Oregon, offering new details about the place the birds go in winter. The know-how is portray a fuller image of the woodpeckers’ annual actions, says MPG Ranch biologist William Blake, and serving to to pinpoint the place they could be working into bother from logging, wildfires, or different threats—and thus the place to focus conservation efforts.
From left: In Florence, Montana, William Blake retrieves knowledge from a Motus station alongside the Bitterroot River. The system detects and information tagged birds, together with Lewis’s Woodpeckers, that move by; ecologist Kate Stone readies a Lewis’s Woodpecker for launch after equipping it with a radio tag; an innovation in radio tag know-how makes them light-weight sufficient to connect to small animals comparable to songbirds, bats, dragonflies, butterflies, and others. Images: Tailyr Irvine
The Lewis’s Woodpecker is one in every of a whole lot of species that scientists are remotely monitoring with the Motus Wildlife Monitoring System, which went on-line in 2015. Named after the Latin phrase for motion, Motus makes use of arrays of automated radio receiver stations to detect tagged animals over huge distances. Right now some 1,500 receiving stations are lively across the globe. Scientists have affixed tags to greater than 34,000 animals, from birds and bats to butterflies and bumblebees.
The Motus community is overseen by a crew on the nonprofit Birds Canada together with longtime migration scientist Stu Mackenzie, who helped pioneer the system with Acadia College researchers within the early 2010s. Whereas scientists have used radio telemetry to trace animals because the Sixties, current technological advances have ushered in miniature tags weighing as little as a espresso bean. These tags will be connected to songbirds as small as Canada Warblers or Grey-cheeked Thrushes—and even tinier bugs. Along with finding out their actions, scientists can analyze tag knowledge to glean particulars like when a chook is lively, when it’s sleeping, and when it takes flight.
A biologist attaches a radio tag, readable by Motus stations, to a Kirtland’s Warbler. Radio tags will be connected with a dab of glue on a chook’s feathers, which can ultimately molt off with the system, or safely looped round their physique with light-weight string. Picture: Karine Aigner
Previously scientists needed to observe radio-tagged animals with cumbersome handheld antennas, stalking them throughout the panorama to get inside sign vary. Now with Motus, an unlimited group of collaborators have assembled a world community of stationary, cheap radio receivers that may passively choose up indicators from any tagged animals close by.
“You possibly can put a Motus station on absolutely anything,” Mackenzie says. Many are stand-alone towers. However they’ve additionally been connected to phone poles, climate stations, ships, lighthouses, highschool roofs, and, close to Tucson, Arizona, an inactive windmill. One factor these places all have in frequent: a transparent view of the sky, to greatest choose up indicators.
When a chook passes by a receiving station, a pc information and shops the distinctive radio ID from its tag. Many stations add these knowledge on to the Motus database housed at Birds Canada’s Nationwide Information Centre in Ontario. This centralized database is the ultimate innovation underlying Motus’s success. It connects all antennas from world wide and makes the knowledge freely accessible to researchers and the general public at motus.org.
In Lengthy Level, Ontario, migration researcher Stu Mackenzie, together with his canine assistant Alba, checks on a Motus antenna at Birds Canada’s Lengthy Level Chicken Observatory. It’s a part of a undertaking that put in greater than 100 Motus stations throughout the Canadian province. Images: Laurence Butet-Roch
Each monitoring know-how has its execs and cons. GPS tags, which have been deployed because the mid-Eighties, are probably the most geographically correct, however they’re heavy and costly. Geolocators, half-gram sensors that estimate location from gentle depth, got here on the scene within the early 2000s, permitting researchers to observe songbirds for the primary time. However in addition they have a catch: You could recapture a chook to get better the info saved on the gadget, and nearly all of birds are by no means recaptured.
With Motus, there’s no must spend days or perhaps weeks within the area attempting to catch birds that had beforehand been tagged. What’s extra, the system harvests knowledge in actual time. “I can sit in my workplace at a college or at an Audubon facility, and the info come to me,” says Cristina Francois, former director of Appleton-Whittell Analysis Ranch of Audubon, which erected a station in Arizona in March.
Motus’s fundamental limitation is the quantity and density of stations. Receivers span from as far north as Canada’s Northwest Territories to as far south because the southern tip of Chile, however most are concentrated in jap areas of Canada and america. There are markedly fewer in South America, the place many migratory birds overwinter. “The precise vary of a Motus station is sort of small in comparison with the vastness of the panorama,” Mackenzie says. “There are numerous gaps within the community.”
From left: In Primavera, Chile, the world’s southernmost Motus array tracks the actions of Crimson Knots and different long-distance migratory shorebirds within the Tierra del Fuego area; Semipalmated Plovers that nest on the Arctic tundra are tracked by one of many world’s northernmost Motus stations, situated on the Tundra Ecosystem Analysis Station in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Images: Antonio Larrea; Joel Edwards
When buildings are far aside, scientists are caught making educated guesses as to the routes birds take. In order that they’ve adopted a strategic method in putting some stations to get probably the most bang for his or her Motus buck. A sequence of 4 stations spanning the Isthmus of Panama, for instance, may detect nearly any tagged animal flying overland by means of the slim hall, revealing which birds observe this course between North and South America.
Motus is complementary, not competing, with different monitoring instruments, says Mackenzie: “We wish all these applied sciences to be working collectively to unravel the issues that we face.” It’s a frightening problem. Throughout their annual cycles migratory birds encounter habitat destruction, pesticides, predators, excessive climate, and lots of extra threats to their survival. Data of birds’ places—an endangered species’ flight path or areas most well-liked by flocks—is integral to safeguarding them year-round.
Motus knowledge might help present policymakers the best way to prioritize funding and goal areas for cover. For example, a lot of North America’s grassland birds winter within the Chihuahuan Desert within the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. However farms and ranches are overtaking invaluable habitat. The brand new Motus station at Appleton-Whittell Analysis Ranch is a part of a undertaking led by Chicken Conservancy of the Rockies (BCR) to check how declining species like Grasshopper Sparrow use the remaining Chihuahuan grasslands. “Which of them are an important for conservation efforts to greatest serve the wants of those birds?” says Matt Webb, a BCR avian ecologist. Motus will assist him discover out.
The community lends itself effectively to conservation as a result of it’s collaborative by design. Whereas MPG Ranch’s Blake is utilizing stations dotting the Bitterroot Valley to check Lewis’s Woodpeckers, in addition they choose up any tagged animals that get shut sufficient—for instance, Financial institution Swallows and Golden Eagles tracked by different researchers. “In some instances, [the scientists behind] a undertaking could profit from the actions of tens or a whole lot of people who’re sustaining stations on their behalf, typically unbeknownst to them,” Mackenzie says. “Everyone is working collectively for that frequent aim of understanding as a lot as we are able to about migratory animals and finally conserving them.”
That method displays a development in conservation science as effectively. Information repositories just like the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird, Audubon’s Migratory Chicken Initiative, and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Conduct’s Movebank all embrace open, communal science and rely upon knowledge sharing. “The size of questions that we’re asking for migratory birds is so huge that if you happen to’re not collaborating throughout establishments, throughout political boundaries, you’re by no means going to get the solutions that you just want,” says Invoice DeLuca, a migration ecologist with Audubon’s Migratory Chicken Initiative who helps Audubon facilities set up Motus stations. To this point 13 Audubon nature facilities host Motus stations, filling necessary gaps within the community. Audubon additionally helps stations in South Carolina, the Nice Lakes, the northern Yucatan, Colombia, and elswhere.
Blake feels the urgency of constructing partnerships. Lewis’s Woodpeckers are doing effectively on their Montana breeding grounds, so that they have to be encountering threats elsewhere throughout their life cycle that account for declining numbers. As coordinator of MPG Ranch’s Intermountain West Collaborative Motus Venture, he’s working with researchers throughout the West to put in dozens of stations there. They may enable him to reply questions key to the woodpecker’s survival—and assist his colleagues be sure that different species thrive, too.