The Golden Age of Animal Tracking
In 1804, a young naturalist named John James Audubon tied silver threads to the legs of the eastern phoebes, tiny white-and-brown songbirds, that lived in a nest near his home near Philadelphia. The birds soon flew away for the winter. The following spring, two returned with threads still attached. The experiment marked the first recorded use of bird banding in America, a technique for studying migration patterns.
More than two centuries later, technology, particularly the wonder of GPS, has turned silver threads into tags, sensors, and other devices capable of tracking all kinds of species around the world. Today, researchers get text-message alerts from collars worn by elephants in Kenya. They can stick tags on the shells of turtles or attach sensors to the fur of seals that transmit information with the help of satellites. They can even glue tiny barcodes to the backs of carpenter ants.
These are just a few of the projects described in , a book by geographer James Cheshire and designer Oliver Uberti, out this week in the United States. Cheshire and Uberti spoke to dozens of scientists tracking animals, from owls and elk to pythons and hyenas, and turned their data into a collection of
