CSU drone experts have helped develop a way to track songbirds during breeding season in the central and western regions of the Great Basin, an application that shows promise for wildlife biology in general.

The university’s Drone Center partnered with researchers at Oregon State University to deploy a new and unobtrusive way to study how birds – specifically Lazuli Buntings and Green-tailed Towhee – respond to environmental change. They found some species regularly move upslope in mountains during their breeding season, whereas one species moves downslope.

While recent studies about changes in the geographic distributions of breeding birds focused on changes over decades or longer, this research fills a gap by looking at seasonal shifts. The findings build upon research in the Great Basin over the past 20 years.

“We’re trying to do something that we haven’t been able to do before,” said Erica Fleishman of Oregon State University, a principal for the study and director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute. “To understand why songbirds may be moving upslope or downslope within their breeding season, it’s important to understand whether the same individuals are moving or whether some individuals are moving out and others are moving in. We really need to know what individual birds are doing.”

Fleishman collaborated with CSU Master Instructor Luke George, who has a long history of tagging and following birds. They turned to Christopher Robertson, director of the Drone Center, who connected them to Cellular Tracking Technologies. The company specializes in wireless tracking of animals. The collaborators developed a transmitter to track individual birds in real time without harming them.