Scientists have affixed tags to more than 34,000 animals, from birds and bats to butterflies and bumblebees. Today some 1,500 receiving stations are active around the globe. Named after the Latin word for movement, Motus uses arrays of automated radio receiver stations to detect tagged animals over vast distances. The Lewis’s Woodpecker is one of hundreds of species that scientists are remotely monitoring with the Motus Wildlife Tracking System, which went online in 2015. The technology is painting a fuller picture of the woodpeckers’ annual movements, says MPG Ranch biologist William Blake, and helping to pinpoint where they might be running into trouble from logging, wildfires, or other threats-and thus where to focus conservation efforts. Individuals tagged in the Bitterroot have also pinged tracking stations in southwestern Oregon, providing new information about where the birds go in winter. When a tagged bird passes within a dozen miles of one of 13 receiver stations in the 96-mile-long valley, its identity is automatically logged at the antenna location, revealing its movements on its breeding grounds. Since 2019 they’ve attached radio transmitters to birds breeding in the Bitterroot Valley. To figure out what’s spurring the losses, scientists at MPG Ranch, a conservation research group in western Montana, are tracking Lewis’s Woodpeckers with a simple and increasingly popular technology. Captivating as it is, however, there is still much we don’t know about the bird’s movements and biology-or what has driven its population to decline by about half since the 1960s. While wintering in forests of the far West and Southwest, it aggressively defends caches of stored nuts from piratical Acorn Woodpeckers. In summer it swoops and circles over woodlands west of the Great Plains, performing aerial acrobatics as it hunts insects on the wing. It has a ruby-red face and emerald feathers draped across its back like a cape with a silver cowl. The Lewis’s Woodpecker is one of the West’s avian gems.
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