THE WARBLERS HAVE BACKPACKS NOW.
Researchers are fitting tiny songbirds with Tic Tac-sized geolocator backpacks that record light and atmospheric pressure across entire migrations. Serious science has once again required an extremely small backpack.
THE WARBLERS HAVE BACKPACKS NOW
To find out where a bird the weight of a spoonful of sugar actually goes, researchers have to build a tracker small enough to ride on its back — and then find the same bird again.
WHAT HAPPENED
Writing in The Conversation, Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center postdoctoral researcher Stephanie Szarmach describes fitting myrtle warblers breeding in Anchorage, Alaska with multisensor geolocator backpacks that log light levels and barometric pressure.
The tracked birds did not take the short Pacific Coast route to California that researchers expected. They looped roughly 6,800 miles east across Canada's boreal forest and down to the Gulf Coast and back.
The method has limits: light-level geolocators can be off by hundreds of miles and lose accuracy near the equinoxes, and even the newer pressure-sensing units store their data onboard, so the bird has to be physically recaptured before anyone learns anything.
WHY THIS IS HOPESLOP
The science here is genuinely difficult and the equipment is genuinely adorable, and those two facts refuse to cancel each other out.
Someone decided the only way to know a butter-butt's route was to build a backpack the size of a Tic Tac, put it on, wait a year, and find that exact bird again in a spruce tree. They did. The bird had gone the long way round.
ORIGINAL SOURCESmithsonian Migratory Bird Center / The ConversationRead the original report