By Brad Warren
"Right now I'm looking at a bird in the Kahiltna River Valley, south of Mount Denali National Park, north of Anchorage," says wildlife biologist John Takekawa, peering at a computer screen in his office at a branch of the US National Biological Survey in Dixon, California. "It's a tule goose that was marked in the Sacramento Valley. I can report a new finding: the birds are staging in this particular wetland where people have not reported seeing them before."
Both the tule goose and the snow goose, species whose populations in some regions are at risk, are difficult to keep track of. Every year, after breeding in Siberia, the snow goose flies to North America, sometimes as far south as Mexico. The US National Biological Survey wanted to learn about the birds' migration habits to determine how land development was affecting the declining population. But standard animal-tracking radio transmitters typically used to monitor the migration of larger animals would have kept the 5-pound birds grounded.
Luck would have it that an employee of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, which had recently developed a 35-gram satellite radio transmitter, learned of the federal agency's plight. The company contacted Takekawa and built the transmitter onto a small collar that fits around the neck of a goose.
The system enables Takekawa and his associates to track birds thousands of miles away. Birds of several large species have been wired with transmitters. Their location signals are routed through the French-owned Argos satellite telecommunications network to reach ground-based researchers.
"I think this satellite radio will help save a lot of species," says Takekawa. "So many species disappearing so fast requires a very quick ability to ascertain what they need before they're lost."
One glitch in this otherwise dandy setup: preventing the birds from ditching or destroying the transmitters. Like cats that hate their flea collars, they are adept at unburdening themselves. They also hang around in radio-unfriendly climates, including under water. Takekawa counts himself lucky that of the 29 snow geese that left Russia in his study, 11 reached the US and Canada with their transmitters still working. A possible solution: implanting the transmitters, so birds can't dodge surveillance so easily.
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