Tiny Technologies and Big Discoveries

Via Birdwatching Field of View

Did you know male and female Burrowing Owls winter in different places? photo from Wikipedia

Occasionally it's hard to wrap one's mind around how far technology has come in such a short time.  When we have these discussions about playback and eBird it's easy to forget how new even the whole "internet" thing is.  In many ways we're still feeling all this stuff out and there's bound to be some friction as we adjust to a new set of social and cultural mores in the birding community and in our non-birding lives. 

But technology is also an amazing thing.  We have the ability to communicate anytime and from nearly any place, for better or for worse.  We carry around computers in our pockets with more power than the NASA mainframes that sent Apollo 11 to the moon.   And we are able to create geolocaters so small that they can be attached to the back of a migratory bird with little to no effect on that individual. 

That last one has enabled some pretty spectacular results in the last couple years, in species that previously were not considered big enough to handle a such a sophisticated piece of technology.  The most famous in the last year may be the discovery of the wintering grounds of the Black Swift, the last breeding bird in North America for which that place where it spent the majority of the year was still unknown.  We mentioned that paper here at the ABA Blog, but there have been a multitude of species for which researchers have made cool breaktroughs, and those birds are highlighted in a great post at Birdwatching magazine's Field of View blog.

From Snow Buntings to Gray Catbirds to Northern Wheatears, each fascinating in its own way.  Check it out.

Comments

[Chris Hill]

Small correction - Geolocators, not geotransmitters. They don't transmit anything. They log light and dark, and have to be recovered from the animal after deployment in order to download that data (and laboriously convert it to location). So very different from the satellite transmitters larger birds can carry, which do transmit locations.

[Nate Swick]

Right on. I'll fix. 

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