A network to help protect birds expands at Connecticut Audubon

Chimney Swifts have been among the 18 species detected by Connecticut Audubon’s Motus antennas. Their population has been in steep decline. Photo by Jim McCulloch.

In the Sanctuaries…
November 15, 2021 — Let’s say you’re a conservationist working to protect a bird species whose population is falling. Those birds aren’t hard to find. In the last 50 years, North America has lost 30 percent of its birds.

Your work is concentrated in an area that is a breeding stronghold for the species you’re studying. You know where they nest and how to protect them during breeding season.

But what about the rest of the year?

Where do the specific birds you are studying spend the winter, and what route do they take to get there?

Since 2018, Connecticut Audubon has been part of a growing communications network that lets conservation scientists (and everybody else) see which routes birds take when they are migrating and where their journeys lead.

The network is called the Motus Wildlife Tracking System. It relies on tiny transmitters attached to individual birds, and a series of antennas erected throughout the U.S. and Canada.

Bringing Birds Back
Bird populations are in decline. A team of scientists showed two years ago, in the journal Science, that North America has three billion fewer birds than 50 years ago.

Bringing those birds back will require conservation efforts on many fronts, carried out locally, regionally, nationally and across borders. Motus is already proving to be one of the most important tools.

Connecticut Audubon is at the forefront of that effort in the state. Your support is what makes it possible.

“Our conservation work is focused on the effort to bring birds back,” said Patrick Comins, Connecticut Audubon’s executive director. “We’re protecting and improving habitats for birds in our own state, which is also good for other wildlife. Motus is one way we can contribute to bird conservation on a larger scale.”

This Motus map shows the route taken by a Rusty Blackbird fitted with a transmitter in Canada on October 2, 2020. It was detected by the new antennas at the Center at Pomfret more than a year later, on October 24, 2021.

Several months ago, we installed our third array of antennas, at the Center at Pomfret. The other two are in the western part of the state, at Deer Pond Farm in Sherman (erected in 2018) and at the Shepaug Dam in Southbury (2019)..

Combined, the three arrays have detected 40 birds of 18 species. These include at least a half dozen whose numbers have dwindled dramatically in recent decades — Semipalmated Sandpiper, Rusty Blackbird, Red Knot, Chimney Swift, Bobolink, and Bicknell’s Thrush.

Conservationist and author Scott Weidensaul wrote about the Motus network in our 2018 Connecticut State of the Birds report: Motus “is helping conservationists identify the critical places that birds and other migratory animals need to rest and refuel along the way.

“For example, it showed researchers previously unknown staging areas for Rusty Blackbirds—one of the most seriously declining species in North America—and revealed that Bank Swallows use separate roost sites many miles from their nesting colonies during the breeding season.

“Motus is fleshing out the picture of migration so we can make smart decisions about where to spend scarce conservation dollars on land protection.”

How you can use Motus

Motus is a tool for conservation scientists but it’s fascinating for anyone interested in birds.

If you visit www.motus.org and then click on the Explore Data dropdown menu, Receiver Locations will take you to a map of all the Motus receivers in the world.

Zoom in on Connecticut. The yellow dot in the northeast corner of the state is Pomfret’s receiver. There are two yellow dots near the New York border; the one further north is Deer Pond Farm. The dot just north of I 84, between Danbury and Waterbury, is the Shepaug Dam receiver.

If you hover over the yellow dot and click it when it turns red, a window will open with basic information about that receiver.

If you click “map” on the line for Location, it will take you to a map that shows the range of the array of antennas there.

Then return to the page you were just on. Look for the line that says “Tags detected.” It will take you to a page with a list of the birds that that antenna has detected.

Click on any of the hyperlinks in the Tag Deployment column.

Then on the bottom of that page, look for the line that says: “Show detections in a table/a timeline/a map.” Click “map.”

At that point you can zoom in or out, or click on the dots to find information about when the bird passed a specific receiver.

The Deer Pond Farm and Shepaug Dam antennas were supported by grants from FirstLight Power Resources. The Northeast Motus Collaborative arranged for the Pomfret antennas.

Red Knots have been detected three times by Connecticut Audubon’s antennas. Photo by Patrick Comins.

Your membership and contributions help support the ongoing work to maintain the antennas and download and track the data.

Interestingly, 12 of the 40 birds detected at all three Connecticut Audubon locations have been Rusty Blackbirds. That’s not because Rusty Blackbirds are abundant. It’s  because they’re not.

Their declining numbers have made them the focus of an international conservation effort.

Those dozen birds were all tagged as part of international research projects. Carol Foss, PhD, of New Hampshire Audubon is involved in both. She’s been studying Rusty Blackbirds in New Hampshire’s boreal forests.

She wrote about the work in the upcoming Connecticut State of the Birds 2021 report (the report is titled “Three Billion Birds Are Gone. How Do we Bring Them Back?” Its release is schedule for December 2, 2021. Connecticut Audubon members will receive a copy in the mail), in an article titled “Searching the Forests of Far Northern New Hampshire for the Key to Rusty Blackbird Declines.”

Her Motus tagging showed that the blackbird population she’s working with spends the winter in a wide geographic area — near Chesapeake Bay, and along the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia.

One of those birds passed Deer Pond Farm recently, on November 4, 2021. You can see its path south here.

That’s just one data point. But combined with the thousands of others gathered by Motus antennas, it provides hope that we can bring birds back.

This table lists all the birds detected by Connecticut Audubon’s antennas.