Quadcopters -non avian flying things for a change!

I have submitted an application for funds to buy one of these Phantom quadcopters for White Stork research (fingers crossed), so I jumped at the chance to do a short course: Aerial Photography for Fieldwork using UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). 

Also, it looked too much like pure good fun!

Meet the Phantom Quadcopter. With its glowing lights it is sometimes mistaken for an alien spacecraft!
Red is the front, green is the back -not so easy to see when it is a distant speck in the sky above you.

In the last few years quadcopters have suddenly become easy enough to fly and cheap enough to be in the range of even the more humble research budgets. Whilst mostly used by snowboarders and skateboarders to film stunts (and most of the aerial footage in Top Gear is filmed with UAVs), they can also be used to help answer a whole variety of research questions.

Fitting the GoPro camera

This particular quadcopter is mainly used to map changes in mountain sides and valley floors before and after volcanic eruptions or erosion events in Ecuador, the Caribbean and other amazing places. The images can be overlaid on to terrain or elevation models to create amazing 3D images of changes over time. 

The Sainsbury's Centre, from the pilots view... 

...and what the quadcopter saw.
Structures from Motion. One of many hundreds of images that we will stitch
together to make a 3D model of the Sainsbury's Centre.

Mission complete. Good catch!
UAVs were all developed by the military so it is full of
military termimology. A flight is called a Mission -of course!

Investing in a quadcopter is much cheaper than purchasing a satellite image -and they are far more versatile and reusable! 

Uses include:
-Vegetation mapping
-Monitoring changes over time, eg slopes prone to rockfall or mudslides; or to detect patches of illegal logging in rainforests. 

-The camera can easily be modified to thermal or near-infra red imaging to look for nesting birds, or assess plant health (by detecting chlorophyll levels). In this way farmers could target fertilize crops rather than treating whole fields. 

-Fire fighters have used UAVs in controlled experiments to to assess how fire takes hold as it burns across a field, and to look for thermal heat patches that may signal fires in a building before any smoke is detected. 

-Or it could simply be used to view high or dangerous to reach places, like me checking number of eggs in inaccessible stork nests. 

The number of possible applications of UAVs in research will only increase as technology improves. I'm sure it wont be long before university degree courses feature modules in piloting UAVs and the post-processing of image data.

Quadcopter cam view from ground level.....
Mission: to map the UEA Broad. Lift off imminent with me at the controls.
Karen holds a GPS to log various control points round the broad.
After we have cropped and merged together a selection of images
into one photo this can then be geo-referenced and digitalised by
overlaying it on to a map layer in mapping software packages, such as GIS.

...and the Quadcopter's view of the UEA Broad.
You can just see a blue spec holding the white box -thats me
at the controls.

The Phantom flies in winds of over 30mph
and flies itself to some extent. It was amazing
to see it leaning against the wind to maintain
position as it hovered. 

Dont worry, nothing died: my favourite talk from the SPEA conference

It was a talk about how nothing died -quite rare for biologists because biological science is seemingly most interested in death and explaining why things died!

In an nutshell, Ricardo Tome and team are using radar and field observations to minimise collision deaths of soaring birds as they pass through wind farms -in fact they have done better than that, they have reduced the number of deaths to zero in their study site: a wind farm in south west Portugal.

I found myself sat opposite him and some of his colleagues over one of those long, tasty, boozy, cafe lunches during the SPEA conference (Birdlife partner for Portugal) that I was talked about in my last blog post. He was a very humourous and entertaining lunch companion as he explained his project in more detail.

As a flock approaches the wind farm, the radar and human observers (placed at some distance around the site), track the flock and decide if the huge sweeping blades of the wind turbines should be stopped. If the flock continue inbound, the turbines are briefly halted, just long enough for the flock to pass through safely. Stopping is near instantaneous and apparently it is quite something to see the wind farm suddenly shut down in unison.

During the whole study period no birds were killed by collisions with wind turbines and there was minimal impact on electricity generation. This seems like a win-win situation to me and captured my imagination, especially because I am an East Anglian lass living on the border of the North Sea in sight of many new off shore wind farms and important coastal areas of birds.

I encourage you all to follow this link and hit the "translate" button -if you dont speak Portuguese
http://www.cienciahoje.pt/index.php?oid=54734&op=all

Shes Back!

Apologies for the extremely long pause since I last posted. No excuses really, other than being very busy with data analysis. So what has been happening? 

STORKS

Aldina and ringed neighbour on the same nests as last year

Goncalo -same nest as last year

 In the past few months over 30 storks have been caught on landfills and fitted with solar powered data loggers.

I visited quite a few of them recently in March by tracking them to their nests. They are being very well behaved this year! Unlike last year, some are in colonies and nests I am already following. Storks usually breeding in the same nest every year so this means I have previous years breeding history for them, which is fantastic news. Also unlike last year, this year many are in nests low enough to be reached with my camera pole. It was quite early in the season so most did not have eggs yet. However, some of the high quality breeding pairs already had a clutch of 5, including logged stork Alina. It will soon be possible to follow the new birds on the website of the BTO, I will let you know when.

I also visited some of the logged birds from last year. Although no longer transmitting they are back on the same nests and appear totally unaffected by carrying their loggers.


FUNDING
My application for funding for fieldwork this summer was successful!
Many thanks to the British Ornithologists' Union (BOU) for your support. Your money will be spent wisely!
http://www.bou.org.uk/

CONFERENCES

A questions session, Congresso de SPEA

My first oral presentation at a conference: The VIII Congresso de Ornitologia da SPEA, Lisbon. 

http://congresso.spea.pt/pt/

SPEA are the Birdlife Partners for Portugal. The White Stork is the SPEA bird of the year so it was very exciting to be making my oral presentation conference debut about them. I was quite nervous about it initially, but everyone was so friendly and interested in each others research that by the time the day of my talk arrived I was actually really looking forward to the opportunity to present my research. I presented the preliminary results of tracking my 15 adult storks from last year: how much they use the landfills, how it varies between winter and breeding season, and which non-landfill habitats they select. It lead to some very interesting discussions afterwards. A great opportunity to catch up with Portuguese colleagues and meet other researchers over many a long boozy Portuguese-style lunch!

CANNON NETTING

Attempting to catch Sanderlings at high tide roosts in salt pans. 

With Jose Alves, Teresa Catry and team.  

Digging in the cannons  for a good firing angle.

A cannon. The charge is in the base and as it fires it carries
the net attached to the shackle at the other end

DATA ANALYSIS
More on that another day... there is too much to say!

IN OTHER NEWS

Literally in the news. 

As part of National Science Week team and as a STEM ambassador, I took my "Geology of Norfolk" work shop in to Great Yarmouth High School. It was run alongside 5 other hour long sessions run by UEA for the whole of year 10. The fossils mostly survived the occasion..... It made the local paper, though not as the headline piece:

http://www.eveningnews24.co.uk/mobile/news/photo_gallery_5_4_3_2_1_great_yarmouth_students_science_lesson_goes_off_with_a_bang_after_rocket_launch_1_3452847

Releasing a male adder

VOLUNTEERING

Spring has sprung, so it is survey season again at the consultancy branch of Norfolk Wildlife Trust. 

This will be my 3rd season as a Norfolk Wildlife Services (NWS) volunteer. Newts surveys are under way and I am also helping out with a series of adder hibernacula surveys too. This involves catching adders, photographing their heads to ID them, and GPSing their hibernaculum. It also involves gorgeous dawn walks on beautiful heaths!

Now you know why I have been a bit slack with the updates! A feast of news on all the above subjects and more to come more frequently from now on, I promise.

Standby.....

Standby! Team Stork are waiting excitedly for news about funding...

Initial meetings have gone well and we should hear in a few weeks whether the funds will be released for us to attach more loggers to adult storks on Portuguese landfills this winter. I wont jinx it by saying any more about it now, just know that we are all very excited and have been tentatively getting ready to spring in to action the moment we get confirmation to go ahead.

Reading over wintering stork rings, Portimao landfill, 

on a gorgeous hot day in November. Chilly, damp UK

in November or Portuguese landfill in November? 

Its a no brainer!

This will sound very wrong to non birders (and some birders too) but I have been missing landfill! Not the stench, or the mud with the dubious bubbling black pools and the bits of unrecognisable floating stuff, but the ring reading. A whole day can fly in a flash by hunting back and forth through the ever changing sea of white stork legs hunting for those illusive colour rings!

Yum! A circuit board! 

One of these fellas is colour ringed but the legs 

closed over it by the time I got out my camera.

Here are some landfill photos to get you all excited with me!

The landfills are great for gull rings too. Peter Rock has been visiting landfills in Portugal to read gull rings almost since before I was born. Sadly this year we wont be meeting up to wash the unique landfill perfume from our throats over a few beers because he is already out there. All my gull ring sightings will be sent his way. All gull ring records are valuable -submit them to Peter Rock (pete.rock@blueyonder.co.uk)

http://www.cr-birding.org/node/85

Above: Beja Landfill, where storks almost outnumber bags 

of garbage. There is always a good haul of colour    

rings after a day here with a telescope.                      

Above: Taboueira landfill, Aveiro                                                       Above: Taveiro landfill, Coimbra

Due to EU directives, open landfills are closing. Aveiro and Coimbra have already closed and sealed -like the mound on the right in the Coimbra photo (above). Reading rings, both gulls and storks, will be a lot trickier in the future once scavenging on landfill is no longer possible and the birds disperse over the countryside.

 

All the gulls flush accompanied by the thunder of poo on plastic....

...far from shelter the only thing a ring reader can 

do is improvise cover and wait for the flock to pass 

over, hopefully without too many direct hits.            

   Daniel Cadwallader knows whats coming!                

Left: Preparing to catch storks. Ines Catry and Carlos Pacheco deploy the clap net at Alvito landfill, Right: a captured stork is hooded to prevent stress whilst the logger harness is fitted.

 Jose Alves, Phil Saunders and Daniel Cadwallader

 reading rings at Evora landfill whilst waiting for a 

stork to walk in to the traps.

 Letting you in to a secret here, if the funding doesn't come off I am thinking of taking some holiday and booking a long weekend in Portugal just to read rings on landfills!

Storks and Espionage!

http://news.sky.com/story/1135591/stork-held-in-egypt-on-suspicion-of-spying

 I never thought "Stork" and "Espionage" would appear in the same sentence! The bird is still in police custody so I really hope my storks do not get detained for questioning anywhere on their travels! Coincidentally, this avian James Bond has similar colour rings to my birds: white letters on a blue background! It is part of a tracking project by a french team.


Here is another link to the great work my co-supervisors the BTO are doing with loggers on cuckoos. No accusations of spying yet for these birds: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-23867438

To Morocco and Beyond!

Once again it has been a while since my last blog post -(more from the lab and the reasons I have been so busy in another update). The exciting news is that in the last few days 2 of the chicks (Lucy and SPEA) have crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and are now in Morocco!

BUT HOW FAR SOUTH WILL THEY GO DURING THE WINTER? 

SPEA, from Beja to Morocco and fast moving south

Storks are very opportunistic and go where the food is, therefore they are not faithful to any particular wintering site. Pairs do not winter together and only meet up again at the start of the next breeding season. Previous tracking studies have shown that some years a stork may stay in north Africa whilst the same individual the next year could travel all the way south to near Cape Town! Where will our logged chicks go? My guess is west Africa -perhaps Mali or Mauritania or as far south as Cameroon, but all bets are good. All suggestions are welcome so get in touch and tell me where you think they might go.

Tracking the progress of the chicks alongside the logged adults should be possible on the website of the BTO from the end of this week, once we have sorted out technical issues getting the logger data to upload to the website....

Nests get very crowded towards the end of the breeding season before the well grown chicks leave the nest. In the north of Portugal and near landfill sites it is not unusual to see 5 or even 6 chicks in one nest.

Chicks stay around the nest being fed by the adults for some days or even weeks after fledging.

How do you tell a chick from an adult?

Until the final stages before fledging chicks have shorter, black bills where as the adults have longer, red bills. 

When the chicks are older their bills start to turn red so it can be tricky to tell them apart from adults. If in doubt look at the rump, the adults black flight feathers overhang the tail where as the chicks are never longer than the tail, as can be seen in this photo =>

For approximately the first 70 days of life the bill grow in direct proportion to the age so measuring bill length can be used to age the chick.

Chicks with Loggers

Lucy (3L+) fitted with her Micro Logger

Apologies for the long pause since my last post, fieldwork was hot and hectic but very successful and, as always, lots of fun. I visited all my study colonies to record number of chicks per nest and gather more samples. More on that in a later post. More importantly, you are, of course, all wanting to hear about the logged chicks! 

Firstly, my sincere thanks to all who generously donated money for loggers -and for supplying good, strong names for the chicks. May they live long and fly far.

Unfortunately we could not fit loggers to the chicks of logged adults. The nests were inaccessibly high or the adults failed to raise any chicks. We even had the local firemen on standby to help us access Carlos's nest but when I visited the colony I discovered he had also failed to breed. Most disappointing not to have firemen helping me out in the field! 

Instead the loggers were fitted to the chicks of non-logged adults in Nuno and Aldina's colonies.

A map of the chicks movements will be uploaded to the BTO's website soon. 

We deployed our usual loggers and trialled some new designs:

Micro Logger:

The new, lighter, Micrologger (left)  next to our usual logger.

                           This was fitted to Lucy (3L+).

                                                                     

Solar panels: Lighter still and longer lasting.

Solar Panels:

 

The solar panel loggers are notably tall so that once the logger settles below the feathers the solar panel still receives sunlight.....

...and so like a little toy car when packed that some doodling was irresistible! 

Aldina's chicks were deemed too small and under weight to carry loggers

 Like preparing to perform a medical operation: Carlos Pacheco getting organised for fitting harnesses.

Bernado (3C+) fitted with his solar panel logger.

With a huge thank you to Carlos Pacheco for helping me fit the loggers.