Hi all, Next Monday the Cayuga Bird Club has a very exciting speaker! Dr. David Winkler will be giving a talk entitled "Pushing the Limits for Tag Size and Life-Span: Tiny Solar Tags and Their Future in Following Bird Movements."
Mon, December 12, 7:30pm - 9:00pm Where: Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd, Ithaca, NY Speaker: David. W. Winkler, Professor, Cornell University, Dept of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Faculty Curator of Ornithology and Director, Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates Here is a preview of Dr. Winkler's talk: "Most birds are very small, and one of the standing engineering challenges for bird-tagging is developing useful devices that are less than 1 g in mass. In the TABER group (Technology for Animal Biology and Environmental Research) we have achieved this by developing a family of tags that have no battery: they rely entirely on a solar cell for the energy necessary to drive digitally encoded radio transmissions from the tags. Lacking a battery, we expect them to remain functional longer than the birds we place them on are expected to live. This has allowed us to produce "life-time" tags weighing 0.4 to 0.7 g with a range of 1.5 to 2 km that transmit a distinctive ID code every second or so whenever they are in sunlight. These tags are already opening up some very interesting new facets and possibilities in monitoring the movements of passerine birds." The meeting is free and open to the pubic. Laura Stenzler l...@cornell.edu -- Cayugabirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/cayugabirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/Cayugabirds 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/CAYU.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --