Birds wing it when it comes to tracking transmitters

Old pilots tell tales of flying with the help of baling wire, spit and a prayer.

For researchers in Nebraska's Sand Hills, the 21st century formula for feathered flight is Teflon, solar-powered satellite transmitters and old-fashioned crossed fingers for good luck.

This is the high technology on wing across Nebraska and North America as scientists — and armchair birders around the world — track two adult female long-billed curlews.

The birds were outfitted May 19 on their Garden County nesting grounds with $3,000 micro-sized transmitters held to their backs with a Teflon harness. The purpose of the project is to understand where Nebraska's long-billed curlews migrate for winter.

The Nebraska curlews — one is named “Sandy'' and the other “Bailey” — haven't been seen for weeks, but the transmitters continue to send data daily.

Researchers created a Web site (www.BirdsNebraska.org) for people to follow the progress of the curlews. The site is updated frequently.

Nesting habitat in Nebraska is critically important to these birds but curlews may spend as much as 75 percent of the year somewhere else, said Iowa State graduate student Cory Gregory, who is doing most of the field work.

Gregory, who caught the birds and attached the transmitters, said linking nesting sites to migratory stopover sites and wintering areas will aid conservation efforts.

Curlews arrive in Nebraska as early as late March for breeding and are sitting on eggs by mid-April. They nest in rangeland, typically by scratching a depression in sand.

“They like to be in unbroken natural habitat or grazed acres, where the grass isn't tall and they can see predators,'' said Joel Jorgensen, the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission's nongame bird manager.

Nebraska's prime nesting spots are the moist meadows of Crescent Lake National Wildlife Refuge and Garden, Sheridan and southwest Cherry counties.

Long-billed curlews have only one brood a year and Bailey's and Sandy's nesting attempts failed this year. Sandy lost her nest to predators.

Bailey started her “fall” migration June 19. She was recorded Saturday in extreme northeastern Mexico.

Jorgensen said it's not unusual for curlews to start leaving Nebraska just as summer arrives.

“Over the next six weeks, the majority will leave and head back to their wintering ground. The young may hang around until August but they'll be gone by the end of that month,'' he said.

Long-billed curlews are the largest shorebirds in North America. They are named for a long down-curved bill and their “cur-lee'' two-note call. While still relatively numerous (123,500 individuals in 2007), they are a species of concern and considered critically imperiled.

Curlews breed in Great Plains and Intermountain West rangeland, including Nebraska's Sand Hills and Panhandle. They winter along the Gulf and Pacific coasts, and at interior sites in Mexico and southern Texas.

The size and weight of the satellite transmitters (they weigh seventh-tenths of an ounce) are limited to ensure that they don't impede the bird's ability to fly. The antenna is about eight inches long. The transmitters will track the curlews as long as the solar panel charges the unit and as long as the bird survives. It is hoped they will function for a year or more.

Similar tracking devices are revolutionizing what scientists know about the movements of other globe-trotting birds, such as geese and cranes. The same technology chronicled a female bar-tailed godwit's eight-day, non-stop 7,270-mile flight from her Alaska breeding grounds to New Zealand for winter in 2007.

The project is a partnership between Iowa State, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Nebraska Game and Parks, Sandhills Task Force, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Crescent Lake refuge.

Major funding is provided by the Nebraska State Wildlife Grant Program. The Sandhills Task Force paid for one of the satellite transmitters.

“It's a stressor to put the transmitters on curlews because you don't want to handle them too long and you don't get a second chance to adjust the harness,'' Jorgensen said. “Then you let a few thousand dollars fly off with your fingers crossed.''

Concern over bill

Many farmers hunt and fish, but don't count on them to support the Clean Water Restoration Act, says the Nebraska Farm Bureau.

“Farmers care about the environment, but we feel (wetlands conservation organizations are) just a tad shortsighted in terms of what this bill would do,'' said Jordan Dux, the Lincoln-based organization's national affairs coordinator.

“It's not the here and now, it's the unintended consequences,'' he said.

Ten days ago, the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted to advance an amended clean water act to the full Senate. Supporters said the bill is a positive move to protect wetlands for waterfowl and clean water for Americans.

Dux said last week that the legislation greatly expands the scope of federal regulations and would burden farmers and ranchers.

Farm Bureau's main complaint with the bill is that it removed the term “navigable waters'' from the 1972 Clean Water Act in favor of the phrase “waters of the United States.''

Dux said Farm Bureau fears future court decisions could lead to federal regulation of any isolated wet spot in the nation.

Contact the writer:

444-1127, david.hendee@owh.com