Scientists who work with animals love to track their movements. This can provide interesting insights on everything from mating behaviour, food sources, and even the way animals behave socially – or anti-socially, as the case may be.
This is normally achieved with the use of tracking devices, affixed to an animal so that it can be observed remotely while going about its normal business. However, Australian scientists have recently run into some issues in this area, as the very animals they try to track have been removing these very devices, revealing some thought-provoking behaviour in the process.
Teamwork Makes The Dream Work
Scientists have developed various harnesses and backpacks to fit tracking devices to birds over the years. This small leather harness was used in field work in Denali National Park, Alaska. Credit: Mary Lewandowski, Public Domain
The findings came about as part of research by Joel Crampton, Celine H. Frère, and Dominique A. Potvin, with the trio running a pilot study on a new novel tracker design aimed to better suit smaller bird species. Historically, most common bird trackers have been too large to fit on medium to smaller species of bird, and while some solutions do exist, they have typically suffered in regards to their data capacity or their battery life.
The new trackers under trial held GPS hardware, and weighed les ..
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