CAMPUS NEWS
Stewards of the Earth Still in its infancy, the River and Field Campus is becoming a hub of new opportunities for students who want to gain a better understanding of the natural world and its inhabitants, including migratory birds, wild plants, and the humans who impact their survival. This spring, Foreman’s Branch Bird Observatory installed two stations that track migratory patterns via nanotechnology, and the Eastern Shore Food Lab began creating an outdoor learning space for the study and production of wild foods, primitive technology, and ecological landscape design.
The Stories of Flight
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TOP: The Motus network facilitates FBBO’s collaboration with Lights Out Baltimore and the Phoenix Wildlife Center, which rescue and rehabilitate birds injured in building collisions in Baltimore. Pictured is an American woodcock that was rescued after hitting a city building. Photo courtesy of Lights Out Baltimore. BOTTOM: Nanotags emit a unique identifier that is picked up by stations in the Motus network.
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WASHINGTON COLLEGE MAGAZINE
ashington College’s Foreman’s Branch Bird Observatory (FBBO) has become part of an international network that is revolutionizing scientists’ ability to understand the lives and migratory patterns of birds, bats, and even large insects. Two stations installed in late April, one atop a grain elevator at the River and Field Campus and another on the James Gruber Banding Laboratory, are among the first 10 Motus Wildlife Tracking System stations in the state and the only ones associated with a college or university in Maryland. Motus is Latin for “movement.” Developed in Canada, the Motus Wildlife Tracking System now has more than 500 stations that can track animals using nanotags, digitally encoded radio transmitters that emit a specific signal with an individual identifier. As it passes within range of a station, a tagged animal can be identified, and as the network expands, it’s giving scientists the opportunity to ask entirely new questions in their research into migration patterns and methods. “While this system probably won’t replace banding in the near future because of economics, it will clearly play a role in tracking a single bird’s migratory pathway from start to finish and return, now and in the future. It will require numerous towers throughout the country to accomplish that,” says Jim Gruber, founder and master bander of FBBO. “With the antennas in place, Washington College students could potentially develop their own localized studies using not only birds, but insects, bats, and other small flying organisms.” “Once you let a bird go from [traditional] banding, only a handful are picked up,” says Luke DeGroote, avian research coordinator at Powdermill Nature Reserve and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.
“But the Motus network can detect 50 percent or more of the birds we tag.” The new stations at Foreman’s Branch are part of a $500,000 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grant, coordinated through a collaboration of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, the Pennsylvania Game Commission, and eight organizations, to dramatically expand—by 46 stations—the Motus network in Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. This expansion is aimed specifically at eight species deemed in need of conservation in the mid-Atlantic—Bicknell’s, Swainson’s, and wood thrushes; blackpoll and Canada warblers; rusty blackbirds; American woodcock; and northern myotis bats. “These two stations will provide a whole new way for our students to understand bird migration, life cycle, and how what we do at Foreman’s Branch contributes to that knowledge base,” says Maren Gimpel, field ecologist and outreach coordinator at Foreman’s Branch. “Maps at the banding lab already show where birds we have banded have been recovered, but Motus takes this data to a much more detailed resolution for some individual birds, and students and faculty can use the Motus website to see examples of these migratory pathways for birds that we band here.” The Foreman’s Branch stations are supporting DeGroote’s first-of-its-kind, three-year study into the long-term effects of what happens to birds after they’ve survived a collision with a building. While the greatest threats to birds include habitat loss and climate change, according to a 2014 study led by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, approximately 600 million birds are killed annually in the U.S. in building collisions. Still, thousands of birds that hit buildings survive, many of them when they’re found and brought to rehabilitation centers and then released.