Like people on a protracted street journey, migrating birds want spots to relaxation and refuel on their extraordinary journeys.
The Motus Wildlife Tracking System is a global collaborative monitoring community to know fowl migrations and actions. And quickly, because of the Northern Arizona Audubon Society, that community could have two monitoring stations in northern Arizona.
Motus, from the Latin phrase for motion, includes tagging birds with tiny radio transmitters. When a radio-tagged fowl flies inside 9 to 12 miles of a Motus monitoring station antenna, it ‘pings’ a detector and is recorded on the venture’s open access database.
One of the brand new stations can be on Anderson Mesa, a globally acknowledged Important Bird Area. The second can be on Rancho Tres Brisas within the Verde Valley, becoming a member of 4 Motus websites in central-southern Arizona that are already yielding necessary outcomes.
In August a Motus antenna in southeastern Arizona detected a federally threatened species, the Yellow-billed Cuckoo, a fowl with a protracted showy tail. The fowl had been fitted with a transmitter earlier this summer season in Kern County, California. Motus information present that the cuckoo, nicknamed Hummus, had already traveled 900 miles, by way of no less than six totally different wildlife preserves on its strategy to South America.
Knowing the migration routes of birds like Hummus will give insights into strategic habitat safety for this and lots of different imperiled migrant species.
This Earth Note was written by Diane Hope and produced by KNAU and the Sustainable Communities Program at Northern Arizona University, with funding from the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies.
