WILLISTOWN CONSERVATION TRUST

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Bird Conservation Group Receives Funding from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to Track Important Migratory Routes along the Northeast

December 1, 2021 By Monica McQuail

The ability of scientists to track migrating animals as small as hummingbirds and butterflies along the Atlantic Coast will take an important step forward in the coming year, thanks to a partnership between the Northeast Motus Collaboration (NMC) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS).

The NMC, comprised of Willistown Conservation Trust in Newtown Square (where it is based), the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, the Ned Smith Center for Nature and Art in Dauphin County, and Project Owlnet, has received $82,500 from the USFWS to upgrade a dozen stations in the Motus Wildlife Tracking System, a rapidly growing global network of automated telemetry receivers.

Established in 2013 by Birds Canada, the Motus Wildlife Tracking System combines highly miniaturized transmitters, some weighing as little as 1/200th of an ounce, with more than 13,000 automated receiver stations around the world. As a result, scientists can now track small birds, bats and even migratory insects like monarch butterflies and green darner dragonflies across continents and hemispheres, like a gray-cheeked thrush that made a remarkable 46-hour, 2,200-mile non-stop flight from Colombia to Ontario.

The Northeast Motus Collaboration will upgrade 12 coastal Motus sites managed by the USFWS, from Massachusetts to Virginia, which were among the earliest stations in the Motus network. With these upgrades, the receivers – which originally tracked transmitters using the 166 MHz frequency – will also be able to monitor a second, 434 MHz, which is used by a new generation of tracking tags. The funding will also underwrite maintenance on the stations through 2024 and decommission two sites that are no longer needed.

  • Oven Bird with Nanotag. Photo by PARC
  • Todd Allegher of Willitown Conservation Trust working on a Motus Station in Nantucket
  • Northeast Motus Collaboration – Todd Allegher, Pam Loring, Zoe Korpi at a Nantucket Motus Station

Says U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Public Affairs Specialist David Eisenhauer, “We are thrilled to work in partnership with Northeast Motus Collaboration to upgrade Atlantic coast Motus stations with new tracking technology. These stations provide key detection coverage at coastal sites throughout the northeastern U.S. to track regional movements of thousands of birds, bats, and insects tagged by Motus collaborators throughout the Western Hemisphere. Data collected by the Motus stations help us learn more about migratory routes and stopover sites used by many different species as they travel, rest, and refuel throughout our region. This information is critical for developing science-based conservation strategies to benefit wildlife, habitats, and people at local to international scales.”

Since its founding in 2015, the Northeast Motus Collaboration has installed more than 100 Motus sites in the mid-Atlantic states and New York, and is in the middle of a multi-year project to install an additional 50 sites in New England. It is, after Birds Canada, the largest operator of Motus receivers in the world. Says Willistown Conservation Trust’s Director of the Bird Conservation Program and Northeast Motus Principal Lisa Kiziuk, “This critical funding is a testament to the scientific understanding and advancement that we can achieve when we collaborate for conservation.” The work of Northeast Motus Collaboration has been made possible by state and federal grants, private foundations and individual donors.

Northeast Motus Collaboration – The Mission of Northeast Motus Collaboration is to create an interior northeastern U.S. telemetry network to track migratory animals while taking a landscape-scale approach to conservation – connecting enormous expanses of land through scientific research, for the benefit of both humans and wildlife. For more information, visit www.northeastmotus.com.

Willistown Conservation Trust – Found 20 miles west of Philadelphia, Willistown Conservation Trust focuses on 28,000 acres within the watersheds of Ridley, Crum, and Darby Creeks of Chester and Delaware Counties. Since 1996, the Trust has permanently conserved over 7,500 acres, including three nature preserves open to the public: Ashbridge Preserve, Kirkwood Preserve, and Rushton Woods Preserve, which is home to Rushton Conservation Center and Rushton Farm. The Trust offers six nationally renowned programs for public engagement and research: Bird Conservation, Community Farm, Education and Outreach, Land Protection, Stewardship, and Watershed Protection Programs. For more information, visit www.wctrust.org.


Filed Under: Bird Conservation, Motus

Nature at Night: Flappy Hour, Using Motus to Track the Flight Path of an Avian Biologist

October 9, 2020 By Communications Team

Meet Shelly Eshleman, our newest Motus team member and bird conservation biologist as she describes her path to working for Willistown Conservation Trust. She will give an inside view of what life as a Motus technician is like and describe the Bobolink project she’s been working on with Zoe Warner.

Recent Article by Zoë Warner | Article published by Brandywine Conservancy

PRESERVED LANDS IN KING RANCH AREA OF CHESTER COUNTY OFFER HOPE AND SUMMER HOME FOR BOBOLINKS
By: Zoë Warner, Ph.D., Avian Research

Filed Under: Bird Banding, Bird Conservation, Bird Events, Flappy Hour, Motus, Nature at Night, Uncategorized

Unraveling the Mysteries of Migration with Motus Technology

September 14, 2020 By Kelsey Lingle

Since 2017 the Trust’s Bird Conservation Team along with its partners (the Ned Smith Center for Nature and Art, Project Owlnet, and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Powdermill Nature Reserve) has been working tirelessly to establish what is now the world’s second largest array of the Motus Wildlife Tracking System’s automated radio telemetry stations. Motus is a collaborative research project that uses a network of receiving stations to track the movements of birds and other small flying animals tagged with miniature radio transmitters. This cutting-edge technology has transformed our knowledge of bird migration. Watch this fascinating presentation from the Trust’s Bird Conservation Team to hear what researchers have begun to learn and how these discoveries can be shared to help further bird conservation in your community. Recorded on September 10, 2020.

Filed Under: Bird Banding, Bird Conservation, Bird Events, Conservation, Motus, Nature, Owls

Motus Wildlife Tracking System – A Tutorial

August 10, 2020 By Bird Conservation Team

Learn about the Motus Wildlife tracking system by watching this slideshow. You’ll learn about the technology, the network, and its contributions to understanding wildlife migration. Advance through the slides at your own pace by clicking the right arrow.

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Filed Under: Bird Conservation, Motus

Moving Targets

April 29, 2020 By Communications Team

If you’ve ever run a 10K, a marathon, or a turkey trot, you’ve probably pinned a bib to your shirt displaying your name and race number. If you’re like me, it was crooked.

Regardless, that bib helps race organizers keep track of participants: how many started, how many finished, who finished first, last, or not at all.

Banding has long been used by scientists to get a snapshot of bird populations during migration. The problem is few banded birds are recaptured. Pam Curtain

Scientists have long used a similar technique to help keep track of migratory birds. During fall and spring migration periods, ornithologists staff banding stations multiple days a week, catching birds and attaching small aluminum bands to their legs stamped with unique numbers, like tiny race bibs.

But there’s a big difference between tracking migrants and marathoners. Birds don’t have a start line, a finish line, or a marked course to follow with volunteers handing out energy gels and ringing cowbells along the way.

“After we band a bird, it could be any length of time before we see it again, if at all,” said Lucas DeGroote, Avian Research Coordinator for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Powdermill Nature Reserve in Pennsylvania, which has been banding birds since 1961. “We band 10 thousand birds every year, and only about two of those are recovered elsewhere that year,” he said.

Lucas DeGroote of the Northeast Motus Collaboration carefully extracts a bird from a mist nest, a tool used to catch birds during the migration season so they can be counted and banded for future identification if recaptured. Pamela Curtain

Despite the low recapture rate, banding still provides valuable information to researchers. “It gives us a snapshot of populations, and helps us understand their responses to change,” said DeGroote. Say, if you invest in improving stopover habitat at a site, banding can tell you if the total number and diversity of seasonal migrants increases in response.

But banding doesn’t tell scientists where else birds go on their migratory journey, and why.

“The life cycles of migratory birds unfold over thousands of miles,” explained Lisa Kiziuk, Director of Bird Conservation for the Willistown Conservation Trust in Pennsylvania, who launched a banding station at the trust’s Rushton Woods Preserve a decade ago. “If we want to look at where the bottlenecks are, we need to see the whole life cycle.”

Given the dramatic decline in migratory bird species in North America, identifying those pinch points will be critical to ensure that enough stopover habitat is protected in the right places to support birds during these arduous journeys.

Fortunately, partners are gaining ground with new technology that tracks birds and other species along their migratory paths, wherever they may take them.

With support from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Pennsylvania Game Commission is leading a collaborative of two states and eight organizations to close a major geographic gap in the Motus Wildlife Tracking System, which uses nanotag transmitters and an array of radio telemetry receivers to study migratory routes and behaviors.

The tiny nanotags deployed through Motus can be used on smaller species — like northern long-eared bat, Bicknell’s thrush, and even monarch butterflies — than the relatively large transmitters that have been used in wildlife telemetry in the past. Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Part of the Northeast Motus Collaboration, the partners have been awarded a state wildlife grant to install 50 new receiver stations across New England — adding to the 46 being installed in the Mid-Atlantic states — all sited strategically to provide maximum coverage of key stopover locations based on NEXRAD radar data. The funding guarantees that the towers will be in place for at least five years, an important warranty for researchers who often need a year or two just to set up a study.

“Within the next decade, the entire region will be populated with stations listening for tags from wherever they’ve been deployed,” said Kiziuk, who is helping to lead the effort.

There will soon be a lot more to hear. While radio telemetry is not new in wildlife tracking, its use has traditionally been restricted to relatively large animals that can carry heavy transmitters, like hawks, snakes, and bobcats.

The nanotags deployed through Motus can be used on smaller species than ever, like the northern long-eared bat, Bicknell’s thrush, and even monarch butterflies.

This ovenbird is sporting a nanotag, which weigh less than three percent of its body weight and emits radio signals at distinct time intervals, allowing scientists to identify and track this individual’s movement and behavior throughout its migratory journey. Carnegie Museum of Natural History

“Each tag weighs less than three percent of the weight of the animal,” Kiziuk said. The tags can emit radio signals at distinct time intervals, like a Morse code signal identifying each individual.

Partners have already seen significant returns on investment. DeGroote said two-thirds of birds that have been nano-tagged in the project have been detected by towers, which are aligned latitudinally at specific intervals so they will pick up any individuals flying north or south across the region — sort of a proxy for runners crossing a start or finish line. “It’s a much better payoff in terms of detection while birds are moving,” he said.

That data on individual movement is a valuable complement to the population data that banding provides. Compare it to a race: If you are the director of a marathon, you want to know about how many people you can expect to register each year. But you also want to know how long it will take runners of varying skill levels to complete the course so you keep the roads blocked off for enough time, and you want to know where the toughest hills are so you can station volunteers at the top with energy gels and cowbells.

“Motus allows us to ask different questions by tracking individuals, and individual decisions, at different times,” DeGroote said. Questions that can help researchers address specific challenges birds face during migration, including one of the deadliest: One billion birds die each year because they fly into windows, disoriented by the reflection of the sky in the glass.

Todd Alleger of the Northeast Motus Collaboration installs a receiver on a rooftop at the University of Pennsylvania in downtown Philadelphia to detect tagged birds that pass through the city during their migration. Lisa Kiziuk

But what happens to the ones that get back on their feet?

“That’s where Motus comes in,” DeGroote said. “We can now track individuals that hit windows and survive to see what happens to them over time.”

His organization has equipped programs that respond to bird strikes in urban areas, like Lights out Baltimore, with nanotags to put on birds that are brought to rehabilitation centers after hitting windows, so they can monitor their survival and behavior when they are released back into the wild.

Dan Brauning, Wildlife Diversity Chief for Pennsylvania Game Commission and the grant project lead, explained that the ability to monitor individual birds lets us fine-tune how we measure this problem, and how best to respond. “As of now, the estimates of the impacts of collisions are based on finding dead birds,” he said. Those estimates don’t account for impacts to birds that take off and die later, or fly in the wrong direction because they are concussed.

“Motus can help us understand how big the problem really is, and the relative threat it poses to different species,” Brauning said. That applies to other problems too. By connecting the dots between threats and responses across time and space, managers can see where they need to act to address problems on the ground.

Just as important, Motus connects the dots between people who care about these problems, and empowers them to make decisions that reflect the landscape-level needs of migratory species.

Through the interactive map on the Motus website, participants can see the receiving stations, who owns them, and what species have been detected at each one. They can also see the conservation potential of having this regional data available at their fingertips.

“It shows what can be accomplished with a diverse group of people working together,” Kiziuk.

“Information is getting out there faster than ever, and can that can help us make better conservation decisions more efficiently,” she explained.

Ultimately, the effort to recover migratory species is not a sprint. It’s a relay between partners over thousands of miles, and collaboration is key to victory. Cowbells can’t hurt, though.

by Bridget Macdonald, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, North Atlantic-Appalachian Region

Filed Under: Bird Banding, Bird Conservation, Motus

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