Animals online

Birds do it, polar bears do it -- and with the help of satellite transmitters, they send e-mail too.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Aug. 27, 2001 | Cut-rate Viagra offers, get-rich-quick schemes, loony diet plans. The strangest spam you've ever received can't compare to what's in Janet Linthicum's in box almost every day. The predatory bird researcher gets e-mail from bald eagles.

Eagles migrating from Northern California to their summer digs in North Central Canada and back send word to Linthicum about where they are and how they're doing, like sending postcards from a twice-a-year, 1,500-mile road trip.

Linthicum and other staffers at the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group have decked out the birds with special radio transmitters, which weigh less than 2 percent of the eagle's body weight. About the size of a matchbox, the transmitters are worn like a backpack with straps that go over the eagle's breast.

The radio transmitters emit a pulse -- inaudible to bird or human -- that any of the five National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellites orbiting the earth can pick up. The satellites are part of the Argos System, a joint environmental data collection project between France and the United States. The information collected is downloaded to ground receiving stations and then forwarded to Linthicum's in box for study.

"It's remarkable how much more information you can get with the transmitter. No matter where the bird goes you can follow," says Linthicum. In addition to learning each bird's longitude and latitude, Linthicum gets readings from an activity sensor, which determines if the bird is still alive, as well as an air-temperature sensor, which reveals if the sensor has fallen off.

Such "satellite telemetry" lets biologists learn exactly what routes the birds take on their yearly flights -- information important not just for ornithological research, but also for habitat conservation.

"People have done banding studies for years, so there was a little bit of information about bald eagle movements," Linthicum explains. "But the satellite shows exactly where they go and when they go throughout the full year. To get that kind of information, you'd probably have to band hundreds of birds."

So far, the Santa Cruz researchers have put some 15 bald eagles online -- they're currently tracking four. But at any given time there are hundreds of other birds and mammals being tracked and studied through the same satellite system by researchers around the globe. In a given month, the Argos program tracks approximately 7,500 individual objects, living and otherwise; about 20 percent of those are animals in similar studies, ranging from West Indian manatees in Florida to Malaysian elephants and porcupine caribou in the embattled Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Whales have transmitters attached to their blubber that they pull behind them as they swim. Female polar bears wear collars to monitor their movements and their proximity to other bears. Sea turtles carry dive counters in Walkman-size transmitters on the backs of their shells to see how often they take a dunk. And one study of the way nesting geese reacted to a U.S. Army helicopter training exercise involved surgically implanting heart-rate transmitters in a sample group of geese to monitor via satellite if the bird's pulses raced during the helicopter flyovers.

While humans hem and haw about the Big Brotherish implications of new tracking technologies like chip implants and global positioning satellites, it seems like the whole damn animal kingdom has already uploaded its coordinates and biological data into the matrix. Maybe we humans are just late to the party.

Next page: So when does Jennicam also start allowing GPS tracking?