"The male Sprague's pipit was enraged. Flying in the June sky over the Montana prairie, he'd spotted a rival pipit singing in the swaying grass below. But when he dove to confront his adversary, he found himself face-to-face with a plastic replica, hand-painted with the songbird's coffee-and-cream coloring and perched on a large portable speaker. The pipit had been duped. And as he tried to flee, he became enmeshed in a net that researchers had staked into the earth just moments earlier."
"About a decade ago, however, the advent of tiny radio-frequency tags made it possible to track hummingbirds, dragonflies and monarch butterflies. So researchers began to build towers that could pick up the tags' signals, establishing what came to be called the "Motus" network, after the Latin word for "motion." Today, a network of 2,200 towers stretches from Canada's Northwest Territories down to the southern tip of Argentina."
A male Sprague's pipit attacked a hand-painted plastic decoy and became caught in a net, allowing field workers to capture it. The team recorded wing length and weight, collected feather and claw samples, and fitted a backpack-style tag using delicate tools. Radio-frequency tags transmit brief signals that nearby Motus towers detect, providing migration route, timing, and flight-speed data without GPS coordinates. The Motus network comprises about 2,200 receiving towers spanning from Canada's Northwest Territories to the southern tip of Argentina. Tiny tags have opened tracking possibilities for very small migratory animals previously impossible to follow.
Read at High Country News
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]