Sea Turtle and Bird tracking

[Richard Stern]

Hi,

I hope this is an appropriate post for this forum.

Axel's interesting posts about Snowy Owl behavior reminded me of an interesting site - http://www.seaturtle.org/tracking/ , where it is possible to look at satellite tracking data for a number of species of animal - not just sea turtles, but several bird species. I find it fascinating and instructive, and I thought others might too- e.g the Wood Stork data, for all the Floridians in the forums.

Richard

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Thanks for sharing this link, I find these maps very interesting.

[John Chardine]

The whole area of tracking free ranging animals has developed hugely over the past 10 years with the advent of new and amazing devices to do this. One constraint is the mass of the device which should not be more than 5% of the body mass of the individual. Birds are pretty light creatures and the ones that have been tracked to date tend to be the larger ones. There are satellite transmitters that are now down to about 10g so they can be put on birds that weigh about 200g. A technology I and colleagues all around the North Atlantic will be using next year to find out where kittiwakes go in the winter is to fit what is called a datalogger to the leg of the bird with a band. These devices weigh about 2-3 g and log the time at which the sun rises and sets. From this you can figure out rough latitude and longitude. Some can also measure temperature and we use those data to refine the sun-based position. We do this by referring to real-time maps of sea-surface temperature.

Thanks much for pointing this site out Richard.

[Judd Patterson]

Very interesting! I just love these satellite tags and the information that we learn. I recall a tagged Marbled Godwit that yearly would fly between Saskatchewan and Baja California. That bird flew to central Texas to temporarily escape a hurricane that hit northern Mexico...never would have known that without the satellite tag!

Oh, and I have a question for John on his project with kittiwakes. How do you get the data from the dataloggers? Are these something that you have to physically recover in order to use? At 2-3 grams I figure they can't have much transmitting power!