World Science Day was celebrated recently and so we thought it might be worth sharing some of the new technology that we’ve been employing around the Lower Derwent Valley NNR.
Earlier this year we posted about some of our work researching the feeding sites (outside of the protected reserve area) for the nationally important spring passage roost of Whimbrel by using radio tags and more recently GPS tags, and since then we’ve turned our attentions to Golden Plover. Three individuals have been fitted with GPS tags over the last few weeks, which can store fixes of the location of the bird every 15 minutes, with the data stored on the tag until the bird comes into the range of one of our base stations which will then download all of the data. From that download we can then produce maps that shows the movements and important feeding and roosting areas, both day and night.
Such technology is helping us to understand how birds use the reserve and the surrounding landscape, and therefore how we can best help them by developing the right measures in the right places. We are also working with a number of partners to roll this project out into the wider area over to the Humber and its internationally important population of Golden Plover. The map below shows just a couple of days' worth of data, showing that some of the birds are feeding in fields around Wheldrake village and just outside Sutton on Derwent.
Many thanks to our great team for their efforts recently helping to collect this valuable data.
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