Either a bird went on vacation or scientists need a tourist to return their equipment - The Verge
Researchers are asking for help retrieving a lost bird tracker. A tourist likely picked up the GPS device on the beach and brought it home with them from Orkney, Scotland, to London, England.
The hunt is on for a bird tracking device that, instead of logging the bird’s movements, is likely tracking the travels of an unwitting tourist. Researchers are asking for the public’s help to retrieve the tracker so that it can be used to study birds again.
An oystercatcher, a black and white bird with a long, red-orange beak for breaking through shellfish, initially brought the tracker from Dublin, Ireland, to Orkney, an archipelago of islands north of Scotland.
The bird seemed to have lost the tracker at the beach on one of the islands, Sanday, on April 7th. It stayed there until late May, when the device started tracking unusual movements for a bird.
“It’s gone on a bit of a Tiki tour,” Steph Trapp, a PhD student at the University of Exeter leading the research project that deployed the trackers, said in a BBC video. It made its way to a campsite and stayed overnight before visiting a pizza shop. Eventually, the tracker caught a flight down from Edinburgh, Scotland, to London, England. Now, researchers believe the tracker has found a home on a residential street in Ealing in west London.
The GPS device, which looks like a flash drive with a little solar panel attached, sends out signals about its location every couple of hours. That’s how researchers were able to map out the journey they think it’s taken with a tourist from Orkney back to London.
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