Kingsville's bird sanctuary flies into 21st century with GPS tracking of geese and ducks

Windsor Morning8:4121st-century bird banding incorporates GPS trackers to follow geese and ducks

They've been banding birds at the Jack Miner Migratory Bird Sanctuary in Kingsville for more than a century.

Jack Miner banded his first duck in 1909, and it's estimated he put bands on more than 100,000waterfowl in his lifetime.

Those were low-tech items simple bits of metal, stamped with an address and a bible verse.

Today, the sanctuary is upgrading its banding practice for the 21st century, to keep better tabs on ducks and geese.

It's launching a program to study waterfowl using GPS transmitters.

Matt Olewski is the executive director of the Jack Miner Bird Foundation and says the new bands differ from the more traditional ones being used there for more than 100 years.

"When you think about a traditional band, we make a capture and we collect some data on that bird," he said.

"And once banded and released, we have to wait sometimes years before that band is recovered. And what happens between banding that bird and recovering that band? That's always been a mystery."

He says the GPS transmitters will fill in that gap of understanding calling them "cutting edge" and solar powered.

"They have a five-year life cycle. Backpack designs for ducks and neck collared designs for geese."

According to Olewski, the sensors can transmit temperature, velocity, altitude and are equipped with automatic flight detection.

"We can tell the difference between a bird floating on the water and standing on solid ground. These sensors are constantly feeding data to the cellular network and back to our mapping system. We can watch birds in action on a minute by minute basis."

Olewski says banding the birds happens in teams of four or five people because it is not a comfortable experience and intricate when it comes to the application of the sensors.

"Whenever we're capturing birds were incredibly cautious about limiting the the risk of of injury and and also making sure that the process is very, very fluid so that we don't have to handle birds for longer than we need to."

The goal of the tracking is to map the ecology of waterfowl in response to landscape changes.

"We're especially cautious about what is transmitting artificial light and how their migration patterns and migratory pathways are adjusting according to artificial light."

Referring to him as an innovator, Olewski says he's confident Jack Miner would be incredibly proud of this latest step regarding tracking.

"It's taken us about a hundred years to to evolve with the times. This is a moment where the sanctuary with a century of banding history gets to honour that legacy re-entering the the academic world in terms of scientific relevance."