Automated radio tracking system for avian studies

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Birds are highly mobile animals but, perhaps surprisingly, there is a large amount of variation in just how mobile different individuals of the same species are, i.e. how far they travel, during different stages of their life cycles. For example, during breeding birds are tied to a nest location while they feed their chicks. However, some birds manage to find food for their chicks by travelling and foraging over only a few hundred meters each day (equivalent to a walk to the corner store) whereas others fly up to 20 km a day (almost a half marathon). At the other end of the spectrum, migratory birds will travel several thousand kilometers between their breeding grounds in the Arctic and wintering grounds further south. But here, some individuals often travel many hundreds of kilometers further than other individuals of the same species. We still have only a very rudimentary understanding of the consequences of this individual variation in 'mobility' - are there costs to traveling greater distances during breeding, migration or on the wintering grounds, or does this actually bring benefits to individuals - but due to recent technological advances, such as automated radio tracking systems, we now have a much greater ability to follow large numbers of individuals and answer these questions. Here we are requesting funding for an automated radio tracking system with digitally-coded radio transmitters capable of following several hundred individual birds at one time and logging over 250,000 records. This will allow us to obtain detailed information on variation in mobility patterns of birds, and the consequences of this variation, in three different systems: a) during parental care in European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) in agricultural habitats, a species of increasing concern as an agricultural pest, b) in Pacific Dunlins (Calidris alpina), a species of increasing conservation concern, during southward migration from Alaska to stop-over sites in British Columbia, and c) in yellow warblers (Setophaga petechia), a neotropical migrant that overwinters in natural and modified habitat in Mexico.