Our Yellow-billed Cuckoos are on their way back to the breeding grounds!

We are thrilled to announce that one of the Western Yellow-billed Cuckoos that we tagged last summer in the Kern River Valley, affectionately nicknamed Baba Ganoush, was detected by a Motus station near Corpus Christi, Texas on its northbound migration on June 16th, 2024. This is particularly exciting because last year another of our tagged cuckoos (this one nicknamed Stroopwafel, tagged in 2022 along the South Fork Kern River) was detected by the very same Motus station on the Texas coast-- the two detections were just one day and a year apart. The Mad Island Marsh Preserve, where both cuckoos...

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Preventing wildlife deaths in vertical pipes

Death Pipes are everywhere and are responsible for a hidden, avian mortality epidemic. Please get involved and pass this information on to others and help raise awareness of this preventable killing of wildlife. Any open top vertical pipe can be a death trap to birds and other wildlife. This problem is a nearly invisible. Unlike birds colliding with buildings, windows or other structures where they remain visible and obvious to people, birds trapped in pipes end up dying a slow death, completely unnoticed in open posts, sewer systems, septic tanks, or other hidden locations. Hollow metal and plastic (PVC) pipes and posts are...

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Article on our Cuckoo “Hummus”

Check out this great new Audubon Magazine article featuring Hummus the cuckoo and findings from our research using the Motus Wildlife Tracking Network! This work was done on and around the Audubon Kern River Preserve(run by Audubon California). https://www.audubon.org/news/migrating-cuckoo-named-hummus-makes-tasty-case-land-conservation?fbclid=IwAR0iRTaUdIch5wetDwFfL4UMZD3tid0B_zHxV77GWFxNEcI7IbY-y3tKSLQ

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Tricolored Blackbird detected at our Motus Station!

The data is in... and our Motus tower at Canebrake Ecological Reserve detected one of the Tricolored Blackbirds we tagged at a breeding colony April 2022! (The bird in this photo to be exact!) Spring 2022 tagging of tricolored blackbirds. While the 10 mile movement from its original tagging location to Canebrake may not seem like a big deal, it's actually the timing of the detection that we're all excited about. Tricolored Blackbirds are highly nomadic, moving almost year around to follow abundant food resources, and their post-breeding movements (especially in foothill populations like ours) are still poorly understood. There...

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Motus Detects Shorebirds!

Check out these shorebird movements along the Pacific Flyway this year! This study is part of a research collaboration led by The Nature Conservancy to examine shorebird use of overwintering and migratory stopover habitats in California's Central Valley and beyond. Each bird was tagged with a small radio transmitter called a "Motus tag," which is designed to be picked up by Motus stations (strategically placed, automated receivers with elevated antennas) as the bird moves across the landscape. SSRS Senior Research Biologist Pat Lorch installed a whopping 12 Motus stations across central California for this project, many of which picked up the...

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MAPS banding highlights!

We had a special visitor to our MAPS bird banding station this June! This is a male Summer Tanager in its first alternate plumage (FCA). This first photo shows a nice example of juvenal1 (yellow) vs non-juvenal (red, alternate plumage in this case) tail feather shape. The next photo shows the typical mottled red and yellow plumage of a male in the summer following the year it hatched. To nerd out on molt even further... this bird left its nest last year in yellowish juvenal plumage, and did a partial "pre-formative" molt of body feathers at the end of the...

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