The same technologies that help us keep tabs on pets, aging parents, boyfriends or strangers who knock at our front doors are also used to reveal the secret lives of wilderness animals.
As cameras and geographic-locator devices have become smaller, wildlife researchers have repurposed the electronics to monitor the behaviours of birds and other animals.
At one time, data collection was limited by the number of researchers able to work in the field, time of year and luck in finding critters or their signs. Today, these technologies provide many new opportunities for learning about our fellow animals.
For instance, researchers, including a team at the University of British Columbia, are strapping tiny tagging backpacks onto songbirds to trace their migration routes and flight times. The devices weigh less than a dime, and are small enough to avoid affecting the birds’ ability to fly, mate or catch insects mid-air.
The devices record position and time, based on the precise timing of each day’s sunrise and sunset. However, at this time, the devices do not transmit the data. Researchers have to recapture some of the birds after the study period to retrieve the data.
The UBC group used the tags to record different migration routes taken by two different subspecies of Swainson’s thrush to get to their wintering grounds. Some fly south along the west coast to Central America, while others head southeast to Alabama, then across the Gulf of Mexico to Colombia.
The data also pinpointed critical feeding and rest habitats along the migration routes.
Scientists in Tasmania are outfitting 5,000 bees with radio tags. Once the bees are released, the 2.5-millimetre tags alert the researchers when the insects pass detection-checkpoints on the landscape. The pings allow the scientists to map the bees’ behaviour.
Researchers are also enlisting cameras to record animal activity. For example, tiny cameras strapped onto falcons have shown how these birds chase down prey. The falcons use their keen peripheral vision to predict where their lunch will be a few seconds in the future rather than where the prospective meal is at the moment. Like a ship on a collision course with another vessel, falcons target their prey so it’s at a constant angle in their visual field. That angle is the angle they fly at to pluck the prey out of the air.
But not all wildlife tracking requires sticking devices on critters.
Somebody hiking on B.C.’s north coast, for example, can use their smartphone to take a geo-tagged photograph of a wolverine or its tracks, and email it to egulo.wordpress.com. A similar site called iSeahorse Explore, run by an international team that includes biologists from UBC, captures crowd-sourced sightings of seahorses from around the world.
An old standby — stationary, motion-sensing cameras — is also becoming more practical in biology. They help biologists to monitor wolverines, grizzly bears, grey wolves and caribou. Last year, officials in Yukon’s Ivvavik National Park used five outdoor cameras to capture more than 1,000 photos of the park’s wildlife. The park added another 12 cameras to the network this year.
As well, scientists using remote cameras have confirmed that mother grizzlies and cubs now live on 10 islands on B.C.’s central coast not previously known to be home to the bears. The province requires that high-quality grizzly habitat throughout that region be protected, but these islands lie just outside the protected zone.
Many wilderness lodges and research or interpretive centres in B.C. use similar cameras to collect photo sequences of animals’ day-to-day activities, and provide information on the time of day, weather and temperature, and corresponding behaviour.
And, at the other end of the size scale, scientists are using imagery taken by satellites to count seals, penguins, whales and even polar bears in remote regions.
As well as helping us keep an eye on Fido and granny, these technologies are laying bare the day-to-day lives, habits and whereabouts of our wilderness neighbours.
The more we know about them, the better we can help ensure they remain neighbours.
