Motus Wildlife Tracking System: Peace Basin Expansion
This project, led by Birds Canada, will continue to expand the Motus Wildlife Tracking System to track birds and bats affixed with digitally encoded radio transmitters.
Results from this array can track animals across a diversity of landscapes, covering thousands of kilometres, and will support projects on key species, such as little brown myotis bats and white-throated sparrow.
This project will involve community groups installing stations at schools and other locations to incorporate the Motus Education Program, which builds knowledge about birds, bats, and conservation, for grades 7–12.
Update: Twice as many tracking stations for birds and bats
Motus wildlife tracking was expanded in 2022 from seven monitoring stations to 15 across the Peace Region. In one example, a new station was installed at Moberly Lake Elementary School.
Executive Summary
In Year 2 of our project, we worked with various collaborators to install eight new Motus stations. These stations added to the existing stations we installed the previous year, increasing the total number of stations in the Peace region to 15. The stations are spread across the Peace Region in strategic locations from Prince George to Tsay Keh Dene to Dawson Creek. We tagged 50 White-throated Sparrows near Prince George and Dawson Creek and tracked their southbound migration. Of the sparrows we detected on migration, all but one migrated east of the Rocky Mountains toward the Midwest United States. The other migrated to California. Two Myotis sp. bats were tagged near Tsay Keh Dene and data will be retrieved from remote stations in the area in the coming months. We now have a solid foundation for the Peace Region Motus array and plan to continue to fill strategic gaps with new Motus stations. Our tracking results from tagging White-throated Sparrows demonstrates the power of the Motus system to track small animals at large scales. We plan to continue tagging White-throated Sparrows and add tagging projects for priority species in future years of the project. We also plan to continue outreach work and we hope to support local researchers interested in using the Motus network so that the system can be leveraged to maximize the potential of research efforts and for conservation.
Click the provincial database link below to read the full final report for this project.