Pete Marra Interviewed
March 6, 2009
Listen to Pete Marra, Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center scientist, discuss recent advances in songbird research on the Kojo Nnamdi radio show.
Songbird Travel Itinerary
February 19, 2009
Until very recently, scientists had little idea about the actual route that migratory songbirds take on their yearly sojourns. They knew the general areas where birds nest, pass through on migration, and spend the winter. But for an individual bird, the exact time they leave to migrate, how long it takes them to migrate, and the exact locations they stop were a complete mystery.
All this changed when Bridget Stutchbury, a research associate with the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, recently published an article in Science magazine describing her pioneering efforts to spy on wood thrushes and purple martins.
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Purple martin (left) by Richard Stade, and wood thrush (right) by Gerhard Hofmann
She used geolocators, tiny mechanical devices attached with a harness to the bird’s back, to track their locations much as a GPS unit does.
Last summer, Pete Marra attached geolocators to bobolinks in Vermont and seaside sparrows in Delaware. Stay tuned as the results of the study should be available this summer. In addition, this summer he will be putting geolocators on the rare Bicknell’s thrush and the wood thrush from across their breeding ranges.
More about these studies:
