Pickering Creek Audubon Center has installed a MOTUS Wildlife Tracking System at the Center as a collaborative effort to help track birds. Installing a MOTUS system at Pickering enables the Center to contribute data to a multi continental effort to understand bird populations, while giving our students access to data that is locally meaningful about birds that are recorded in their community. Students can see how local data translates to the broader world. This fall we will integrate data from the system into our programming, and students will directly access the data themselves through our in-class programming using Audubon’s Bird Migration Explorer.
The Motus Wildlife Tracking System project, spearheaded by Birds Canada, represents a collaborative effort involving hundreds of institutions, agencies, and independent researchers. Spanning from Canada to Chile, researchers have tagged over 22,000 animals across more than 200 species, including songbirds, raptors, seabirds, bats, monarch butterflies, and migratory dragonflies through a network of Motus towers. The primary objective of Motus is to integrate various individual research initiatives into a comprehensive, hemispheric network of VHF nanotag receiver stations. This innovative system enables researchers to monitor the movements of small flying animals that cannot rely on traditional satellite or GPS telemetry. All collaborators operate on a unified radio frequency, utilize shared infrastructure, access a common database, and, within reasonable limits, exchange results.
Before seeking support for installing a system we spoke in depth with the MOTUS northeast collaborative about the value of placing a tower at Pickering Creek and they felt that it would fill a needed gap with the nearest towers at Poplar Island, on the Delaware line east of Denton, MD and at Blackwater Wildlife Refuge. In the fall of 2024, David Brinker of Maryland DNR and a Northeast MOTUS advisor visited the Center to help us select the most effective location for our antenna system. The system is made of several antenna and relay devices and must be set in a clear line of view at least 35ft off the ground. Since there is not an off the shelf system, each site constructs its own with the guidance of the collaborative. Different sites and site conditions dictate different antenna set ups. Easton Utilities kindly donated a 35ft telephone pole and generously installed it at the Center. Over the course of a full day this past winter the complex antenna system was then installed a top the telephone pole, which sits adjacent to the Center’s main parking lot.
Ned Gerber and his team from Chesapeake Wildlife Heritage partnered with Pickering Creek for the on- the-ground installation, as they were installing an antenna at their sanctuary at Barnstable Hill Farm on Kent Island. We researched the project together and completed the MOTUS installation in the same time period, making the most of our resources to install both systems at the same time. During spring migration in May, the Chesapeake Wildlife Heritage and Pickering Creek systems picked up completely different birds, illustrating the value of having these detectors at multiple locations.
Seven species have been detected, American Kestrel, Wood Trush, Ovenbird, Common Nighthawk, Eastern Towhee, Eastern Whip-poor-will and Hermit Thrush. Our first detection occurred in mid-March, an American Kestrel that was banded in western Massachusetts last summer before flying south and being detected repeatedly through Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. Its last detection was last summer around Blackwater Wildlife Refuge, the nearest tower to Pickering from the south. No subsequent detection of the Kestrel between late last summer and this March were made.
One of the three Wood Trush detected late this spring had visited Guatemala and Jamaica over the previous winter, a Common Nighthawk that was detected at Pickering Creek had been detected as far south as Colombia and as far north as Maine.
“We expect a similar number of detections during fall migration as birds travel south for the winter. We have already detected a Kestrel in the last week of July and expect detections of new birds to be weekly though October, “said Pickering Director Mark Scallion.
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