 team. That sounds nice and ocean theme. Yeah, because my daughter and her husband love spending time in Baja, California, Mexico. They live in Reno, Nevada. Not a lot of ocean there, but they love going down to Mexico. So I thought that would be sort of a fun connection. Again, if you're just joining us, we're going to get started in one minute. If you'd like to introduce yourself and tell us where you're from, you're welcome to use the chat room feature down below at the bottom of your screen, your Zoom screen, that is. And otherwise, well, it'll be just a minute. Ellen's asking you a question already, Sally, in terms of where, if that shop is on Route 1 in November. Yes. We've already drilled the whole presentation. This is all going to be about quilting, I can tell. Oh, no, well, Jacqueline's turning it back to Bird. She says her son in New York found a dubkey this week on the road. I saw that on one of the main wildlife websites that the dubkeys got blown in by the storm. Oh my goodness. Because they're pretty much completely pelagic birds. They really can't walk on land. Was it still, I guess, she took it to the rehab place. It was still alive, huh? Yeah, I would, yeah, I would assume. Yeah, I think that's where I saw the picture that. Anyway, we have some joining us from Pittsburgh. So I will get us, you're welcome to keep telling us where you're from, but I'm going to get us started this evening by just introducing myself. I'm David LeMond and I'm the manager at the Fields Pond Audubon Center in Holden. And it's great having folks from all over the state, given that Maine is a statewide organization. And so it's nice to be hosting a program with folks from all around. If you're not a member of Maine Audubon, we'd love to have you join our network of statewide and beyond individuals who are supporting our work in conservation education and advocacy on behalf of Maine's wildlife. So you can find out more about that by going on Maine Audubon's website. And let's see, before we get started, I also wanted to let everybody know that we are recording tonight's presentation and that it's in a webinar mode. So in order to communicate with us, you'd have to use either the chat room or the Q&A, and we will be checking that during the program. So if you have questions, we'll also take time at the end to answer questions. So tonight we have a panel of speakers. You can see there's four of us up here. In addition to myself, we have Sally Stockwell, who's the director of conservation at Maine Audubon. We have Amber Roth, who's an assistant professor of forest wildlife management at the University of Maine. We have Michelle Duffy, who is an environmental educator at Maine Audubon, who works alongside with me at the Fields Ponds Center. So without further ado, I'm going to stop sharing my screen, and Sally will take over and share her screen. I'm shared, but I don't see it yet. You are sharing screen. You can't see it yet either, can you? I can. We can see if we go into all your slides. We see all of your slides. Okay. All right. Oops, that's not the first one. Hang on. I didn't do what I wanted it to. There we go. Okay. Now I can see it up there too. It just took a while. Well, good evening, everybody. Thanks for joining us tonight. I'm really excited to tell you about a new project and program that we have launched at Maine Audubon in conjunction with lots of other partners, including the University of Maine. And what I'm going to do is give you a little background on what's called the MODIS Wildlife Tracking Network, and then talk about what we're doing here in Maine to join this international group of folks that are trying to track migratory birds, bats, and insects around the world. And then after I do my little introduction, I'm going to turn it over to Amber, who's going to talk about some on-the-ground research work that they're doing. And then David and Michelle will finish up by talking about some of the educational spin-offs that we're going to be doing in coordination with the tracking program. So let me just start by giving you a little bit of background on what kinds of tools have been used in the past to track wildlife movement. And early on in the 1980s, there were satellite transmitters that were developed, that were able to take read signals off of the satellites roaming around the earth. They could track over very long distances and pretty high data retrieval fees, and very limited to really large species. So then after that, we moved into cell phone transmitters. These were able to be used on a little bit smaller birds, but still pretty large birds like this woodcock here. And they still used satellites. The data would come from the satellites down to these storage areas where the cell phone could then connect to those storage, data storage, and gather the data that way. And then we moved into light-level geolocators. These were developed in, first used on birds in 2007. They were able to be used with songbirds, but they only operate during daylight hours. And so there had to be a lot of interpretation of where the movements would actually be like based on the information that was collected during the daylight hours. So this graph, here's a graph on the upper left that shows that over a 24-hour period, it's only during this daytime where tracking would occur. And then they had to sort of extrapolate from that data using two different methods, the threshold method and the curve method, to kind of isolate where the location of that animal might be, and then track its movement over time. One of the challenges with this approach is that you had to retrieve the light sensor to collect the data. And there's very low rate of return once you put one of these geolocators on the bird. You had to recapture the bird and then collect the data. And that was really not a high rate of return. And here's a little bit more information that shows some of the data that was collected using that technique. You could get, here's an example of purple martin breeding populations that were tracked with geolocators from the United States down to South America and where they showed up over time from different places in the country. And then here's another example on the right of a pre-thonitory warbler movement from Europe and the Middle East and the different dates of where it showed up. Then we went to pinpoint geolocators, which are GPS tags. These could give very precise locations. They were programmed to operate only at certain, between certain dates and time. So here's an example over here, fixed schedule started in October. And then you have another location in in January. And then during the non-breeding season, it wasn't operating. And then it starts picking up again when it returns for the northern migration. But you could only have a limited number of occurrences where you could collect that information. And you had to recapture the animal and then remove the data, these locators before you could download the data. And they were much too big and too heavy to use on songbirds. So next comes the MODIS wildlife tracking system. And that's really what we're going to be focused on tonight. MODIS is not an acronym, it stands for movement. It's a Latin word for movement. And this is now an international program. It was set up by Bird Studies Canada originally. And the idea is that you can erect these towers that are receiving towers that pick up radio frequencies that are emitted from this little nanotag that is attached to the back of a bird or other animal. And then as that bird moves, let's say it's coming north from South America, Columbia into Panama to the United States and up in Canada, you can collect data every time it goes by one of these towers. Same is true for monarch butterflies. And the cool thing about this is that all of these radio tags are on one frequency. The tower with all the antenna can operate continuously. And you can put up to eight different antenna on the top of those towers that are pointed in different directions. So we'll collect the data from different areas. They work out to about 15 kilometers. And the animals do not have to be recaptured, which is a huge advantage. These nanotags are called nanotags because they are tiny. They are a range in size, but they are small enough that you can put them on vats, songbirds, even monarch butterflies, and green-darner dragonflies and collect data as they are flying around. When the MODIS program was first launched, most of the stations were found along the coast. And the focus was really on shorebirds that were migrating along the coast. So you can see here, there's all these dots, these dark areas on the eastern, northeastern coast, and right on the border with Canada, around the Great Lakes area. And those early towers collected a lot of great information for species like semi-pollinated sandpipers, white-rump sandpipers, Dunlens, piping plovers. But we really didn't have any information for birds that were traveling inland. After the shorebird craze, there was also an effort to track saltmarsh sparrows. Saltmarsh sparrows are a rapidly declining species. They are highly vulnerable to flooding with our sea level rise and large storms that are pummeling the coastlines now. So in 2015, there was an effort to try to put these nanotags on saltmarsh sparrows in a number of different sites in southern Maine and northern New Hampshire. And you can see here an example of where those, because there were these towers along the coastline, where they were able to detect the movement of these birds. This is the first time where we've really been able to detect in great detail the movement of these species. So then in the, oh, I don't know, about 10 years ago or so, the folks from the Williston Conservation Trust, Sue Kitsiak, who's the, I'm sorry, Lisa Kitsiak, who's the executive director there, and Steve Weidensal, who's well known for his migratory bird studies and is the author of Birds of Maine, which is a new book that came out just this past year documenting where we find different birds in the state. They sort of launched this idea of, hey, what if we were to take the modus technology and try to put up towers inland, not just along the coast and track where different songbirds are moving in the interior of the US and other places. So I was involved in one of those relatively early planning meetings where we got a whole bunch of people together from the northeast and we were thinking about, well, could we do this? How could we do this? How expensive is it going to be? How can we get the materials? Where can we get the funding for it? So that sort of rolled around in people's minds for several years. And here's what we were starting with in 2018, the locations of the existing modus stations, again, largely concentrated on the coast. But we got together and a number of states, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, Delaware, New York, got together and were awarded a grant through the US Fish and Wildlife Service to start putting some of these modus towers up in those states and also to do field projects on eight species of greatest conservation need. That's a term that's used as part of our state wildlife action program, our state wildlife plan. Each state has to put together a state wildlife action plan. And in that plan, you have to identify those species that are of greatest conservation need. So one of the interesting results that came out of the early effort to put up more of these modus towers in the interior parts of the northeast came from the red knot. And the red knot, as some of you may know, is a globally threatened or endangered species. And its populations have been dramatically dwindling. And we kind of knew where they were traveling along the coastline just based on people's observations. But nobody had been able to actually track their movement across the interior. Turns out that they make a major migratory movement from the coast of Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, across the inland areas of Pennsylvania to the Great Lakes area where they stop and then they may go on from there. But that was a completely new revelation that came about as a result of putting up towers across the state of Pennsylvania. So the program in the mid-Atlantic area was so successful that we got together the folks in the northern New England and decided, hey, let's figure out if we can get a similar grant. So we applied and we were awarded a grant starting in 2020. That's a five-year grant and nearly a billion dollars, a million dollars, excuse me, with a lot of matched money and in-kind contributions and all of that. But the New Hampshire fishing game is the lead agency. However, Maine, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania are all partners along with New Hampshire. And so our goal is to create what we sometimes refer to as fence lines of these modus towers across Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, oops, sorry, and connecting over into New York and then across southern Maine and central New Hampshire and Vermont and then across Massachusetts. And we have these series of towers that we're going to be putting up across the states and the idea is that once you get all of these towers in place, then any bird that's moving or some of these long-distance migratory insects or bats, any animal that's moving across from Canada down further south, we should be able to pick up through this series of towers. This was an early version of where we might put the towers out. It's changed quite a bit since then. But currently, we have already put up five towers in Connecticut, well, investigators, which means we're looking at potential sites. There's a lot that goes into determining whether a site is viable and good and in the right location to create this string of interconnected towers. So you can see here, I'm not going to look through each state, but you can see that we've looked at 120 different potential sites across the region. And then this past summer, we actually started installing some of the towers. And in Maine, we have installed six so far. And we have another one that is scheduled for next year. And we're looking at some other potential sites so that eventually, we could have anywhere between 10 to 14 of these new towers in inland areas of Maine. We'll be a total of 50 new towers that we're putting up across these states. So this is kind of where things stand. Currently, you can see Pennsylvania has a ton of them that they've been very, very active in getting these towers up. Initially, they put this one kind of diagonal line across, but they've added other ones since then. There've been a few here in New York that have been put in. And then Maine, the ones that are here in Maine are added now to this map. And a few others in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island. So we're really excited about where this is headed. Here's a closer look at what we're trying to do here in Maine. Each of the green dots, green circles are those areas where we're investigating, putting in the towers. And the more green there is, the better visibility there is from that particular tower place. The wider the 360 view of picking up signals is. And the ones with the red dots are places that we've already put towers up here in Maine. So you can see they're kind of scattered. And rather than just having the one fence line across this way, we decided to do one that's a little bit more angled southeast to northwest, cutting across the mountains, cutting across the central interior and then out to the coast, adding a few extra ones down east because that's a very important area for migratory song words. And then having this other one in further south in Maine that will go across Maine and connect into New Hampshire and Vermont. So what do these towers actually look like? How do they work? Here's an example of a tower that was put up this past summer with the different antenna in going in different directions. In this case, it's attached to a building, but you'll see that there can be other kinds of structures. And we have, it's all connected either through solar power or through power that is available at a building. In this case, they're using solar power and there's a sign that we created that goes up with each one of these towers as an informational piece. And then here are some of the other examples. Here's the one that we put up at Fields Pond for those of you who've been to our Fields Pond Nature Center. It's attached to the end of the building there. And you can see that it rises up above the peak of the roof so that there's no interference from the building itself in terms of collecting the signals. Here's the one that was put up at Roberts Farm Preserve in Norway, Maine. This is all the gear spread out, getting ready to put the tower up. Here's one that was put out in the Down East Lakes area, Farm Co Preserve, and it's just self-standing up on the top of a little hill there that has incredibly good pickup from all directions. And then here's one that was put up in the Bud Levitt Wildlife Management Area. So each site is a little bit different. It has unique demands in terms of how to set it up, how to rig it up, but they're all geared towards collecting really interesting information. So some of these didn't get put up until later in the summer, but this is a little map that gives a hint of the kind of information we're able to collect already from these towers. Each one of these different color lines represents a different species that we've been able to track through, that have passed through the main towers. We're picked up at the main towers and then retracted other towers for the South. And we're working, in addition to building more towers in the Northeast, we're also working on building towers in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. I'm not personally involved with that, but other members of my team here are actively doing that. And you can see that some of our birds have already been tracked to South America. And the MODIS website has a ton of information on it. You can go into the website, I should have shown you that, but you can go into the website and find an individual tower, go there, figure out what species have been documented, when they were there, where it had been first tagged, and all that tons of information. So it's really fun. And here's a little bit more detail. There's one of the projects that is associated with this grant is looking at rusty blackbirds. So here's somebody who's putting a tag on a rusty blackbird. And then these are the movements they were able to detect from the location is in Northwestern Maine, Northeastern New Hampshire, where these blackbirds are tied to wetlands, pretty much in forest forested wetlands in Northern Maine, and their populations have seen a 90% decline in the last decade plus. So having better information about where they're going during the non-breeding season, what areas they're using is really going to be helpful for looking at how we can help protect these species better. So the MODIS program has been expanding rapidly because it is so versatile and so powerful. And right now there are 1,200 stations in 31 countries on four different continents. That's where all these yellow dots represent. There have been 30,000 animals tagged, 260 species, mostly birds, but as I showed you earlier, also bats and water butterflies and dragonflies and other large insects, a billion detections. There are tons of research projects associated with this data and then 1,200 partners and already been 133 published papers based on the data that this network is collecting. And it's only going to get bigger and grow stronger. So we're really excited about it. And there's a number of direct applications that we can use the information for. We can look at where the migratory stopover areas are for these different species. We can look at full life cycle monitoring, which means, okay, they're here in Maine in the summer, but then where do they go down in the winter and how do they come back? And we can look at risk assessment for wind energy projects. One of the issues that keeps coming up with the siting of wind energy project is, is this in a major migratory pathway or not? And is that going to be a problem? We really don't know beyond the coastline where we know there's high levels of migratory movement. In the interior part of the state, we really don't know where the birds are going. We can look at where their wintering areas are, linking the breeding and wintering areas, and just also understand the timing of when things are moving and when we should be on the lookout for them. And then the other great thing about the MODIS network is that the information is readily accessible by anybody. And it is open, the data is open to anybody to use it. And so you can use it with students to do really interesting work. Amber's going to talk about the work she's do, research work she's doing and the work she's doing with her university students. And then David and Michelle are going to be talking about the work they're doing with younger students. So that is it for me. As David said, we welcome you to join us in our main, become a part of our Maine Audubon family if you're interested. And if you have any more questions, feel free to talk to me or contact me at this email or phone number. And we'll certainly be taking questions. If you have them either a few right now, that might be clarifying questions or at the end of the program. So you had a couple clarifying questions. One was what data, oops, sorry, I got to find it again. What data, oops, sorry, with all the screen changing my screen. It says what data criteria are used to help narrow down which potential sites to investigate? Oh, for placing the towers. It's the biggest thing is whether or not the site has really good visibility that there are no obstructions interfering with the signals that can come from the bird to the tower. And then the other thing is where does it fit in the lineup of the fence line? We want them to be about 30 kilometers apart approximately. And then the third thing is, well, the third thing would be, do we have landowner buy in whoever owns that property? Are they willing to work with us to find a place to put the tower and then to sort of monitor it in case there are any problems like ice storms that might cause damage to the tower that so they could give us a heads up. We're working right now with the folks at Saddleback. We're going to be putting a tower up there next summer. And it was a long negotiation between, well, how do you feel about having this at your site? Where would be the right site to put it? And so there's a lot of different questions there and the landowner has to agree to sponsor essentially the tower. And then lastly, is it easy to hook up to existing power and internet service or do we have to set it up independently and then use solar power too? Great. And one more quick question. The map you showed, someone was wondering, the modus tower that was on the map just north of Portland, where is that? That's at our Bath Sanctuary and West Bath at the Hamilton Audubon Sanctuary. So you can go see it there and you can look at the, there's one of those great signs right there for information and that's attached to the caretaker house. Nice. There was another question, but I'm going to leave it to Amber because I think she'll cover it. Had to do with the nanotags on the birds themselves. Someone was wondering, will the birds preen them off? But I think Amber, you're going to cover a little bit about actual tag. I'll take a bit of a stab at that one. Yeah, I think I might get that one answered. I can also expand upon that at the end as well. So I can answer more nanotag questions. So and I want to thank Sally. I'm going to talk about the fields pond modus station. So I was really happy that she pointed that out and showed it all to you. So that was great. So that was like really good. It's almost like we planned that. So that was great. So I'm going to tell you a little bit more about some of the migration research that I've been involved with, including collaboration with Maine Audubon on some of it. And I have a list of some of the research collaborators, Noah Perlitt at University of New England, Lisa Kazayek and her crew down at Wilson Conservation Trust who Sally mentioned, Carol Foss and her crew at New Hampshire Audubon were that Rusty Blackbird example came from Adrian Leppold who's the state non-game ornithologist for inland fisheries and wildlife. And then students in my lab, Caitlin Wilson and Luke Douglas and a small army of undergraduates that have helped with various projects. See if I can get my slides to advance here. All right. So what are some questions that we can answer with this modus network and the nanotake technology? So I listed just some of the questions that scientists ask, including where do animals go and how far do they move? And Sally showed some great maps that depict that. In addition to the spatial component, there's also the timing. So when do these animals make their movements? And because the stations are recording the time of detection, we're also learning a lot about timing, like how fast an animal moves from one station to another, what time are they migrating, that kind of thing. We also can look at differences between individuals because not all individuals make the same decisions. Do males and females do different things? Do young animals versus older animals make different decisions about their movements? So we can start to kind of differentiate what different individuals are doing within a population, for example. We can also look at the timing of phenological events. One of the first really good examples that came out of some of this telemetry work is looking at a mismatch in phenology between birds and bats that are migrating in the spring and when insects are emerging. And for birds and bats that are insectivores, is that a problem? Are they migrating before they have insects to eat? So we're starting to be able to look at that kind of timing of some of these movements. Also, how long does an animal stay at a migratory stopover location? Pretty much every individual is going to have to make a stop at some point while it's migrating. Where is it stopping? How long is it stopping for? What can we learn about those locations? And there's a whole slew of other questions that we can ask. This is just some of them. So starting to get to one of the Q&A questions about nanotags and actually how they work and how we use them. So here's a picture of a nanotag and hopefully you can see my mouth moving around. So this is the transmitter part right here, the white part here. And this is the antenna going off to the right. And for species that are like rusty blackbirds, thrushes, birds of that size, we like to use these elastic bands. So this is like elastic thread cord stretch magic that you find at your craft store. We're basically using the same thing. It stretches, but has a good fit. It's comfortable for the bird. It holds it snug to the bird. We make it so that it's really snug so that they can't get underneath it. So like they can't get their bill cog underneath it, for example. And we also like to use this weak link idea because some of this elastic material is really hardy and it lasts a long time. And the battery life of these tags is limited. Once the battery dies, the tag is essentially done. We can't do anything more with it at that point. And we don't really want these birds to be carrying these tags forever and ever. So by putting this weak link in there, we hope that the harness will break down sooner than later so that that tag will fall off. So they don't have to keep carrying it. So there's a bit of a balancing act between making sure they carry the tag for the full battery life, but not a full lot longer than that. And in this case, the weak link here is just a piece of rubber band. So kind of low tech in terms of the harness material here. So then what do we do? Once we capture the bird, we fit these loops over their legs. So they carry it kind of like a fanny pack here. And the transmitter rests on their romper on their lower back. And you can see the antenna projecting out past the tail. Felly showed this diagram of a thrush. So it kind of rests like this on the bird. I'll show you some other pictures here as well. So that kind of is how that fits on. And you want the tag to be well fit. So it's not sliding around. So it's not going to get caught on anything. So there is a bit of practice that's needed to make sure that fits just right. All right. So now we've got birds or bats or butterflies, whatever we've tagged out in the world moving around. And this is just a schematic of one of those modestations just showing one of the antennas that is on the pole and their directional antennas. So this antenna is kind of pointing up here to the upper right-hand corner. You can see this big red arrow, which is the direction of maximum signal strength. So that's what's coming into this antenna. So that's the direction that it's going to be best able to detect animals. And it's connected with a coaxial cable down to a receiver. That's going to record all of the radio transmissions that it's detecting. So now let's pretend we have a piping clover fly by. There's a piping clover with a nano tag on its back. You can see the antenna. And it's going to fly by our antenna. And hopefully our antenna has picked it up. And it's going to ping our receiver. So our receiver is going to have detections that it's recording of this piping clover. And then it'll be saved in the receiver. So if this station is all by itself out in a remote area, all of that data is going to be saved onto a little SD card that you've probably all seen. And somebody's going to have to go get that SD card and download the data off of it. In an automated station, like many of the ones that Sally showed you, they can communicate the data that they collect via Wi-Fi, for example. So if you can have your receiver be on a Wi-Fi network, it can send data through that network. Another option for some receivers is they can send data through the cellular network. So just like your cell phone sends data and you can go on the internet, we can send data through the cellular network as well. So you have multiple methods of where the data is. In the end, all of the data needs to get to the MODIS website so that MODIS can process that data. So they have programs that filter through all the radio information that was recorded to find the tags and find that tag information and be able to say what are valid detections that came by this station. The nice thing is, is then I can go log into their website and I can access the data for my individual birds. So if I was the researcher who put this piping clover tag out, I could go and see what happened with my piping clover or I might be the station owner. And I can go and look at my station and see which animals have come by, like the piping clover here. So what are we studying in Maine specifically? Well, this is Wesley Hutchins. He's an undergraduate in my lab. He's interested in insects and entomology. So he is studying monarch butterflies. So here he's putting a tag on a monarch. This is what that tag looks like, very tiny attached to the abdomen. You can see the antenna coming off here. We did a small pilot project at Fields Pond this late summer. We also put tags on rusty blackbirds, which you saw earlier. Here's a male with a tag on. He put tags even on big-nose thrushes. You can see the tag on this bird and the antenna coming down. These were both the rusty blackbirds and big-nose thrushes we tagged in western Maine. And also at Fields Pond we tagged bobbalinks. There's Michelle with a really big grin. She was really happy about this day, I think, despite having to get up really early. And then we also are detecting anything else that flies by. Right? So it's not just about our research and our animals, but who else are we helping in this network of scientists and projects that are out there? So even though I'm not studying bats, we might help that researchers by giving them additional station locations where their bat is going to be detected. So I'm going to focus on the bobbalink project, because we don't have time to talk about all these projects, but I'm happy to tell you more about them if you're interested. So we're going to focus on the bobbalink project. So first, just a little brief background on bobbalinks. I assume many of you know bobbalinks, but just a real quick refresher. We've got a picture of a male and a female bobbalink in the upper left-hand corner here. Bobbalinks are grassland-obligate species. Historically, they bred in tall grass and mixed species, mixed grasslands throughout kind of the Great Plains and part of their east. This is a picture of a prairie here. And it lost a lot of habitat, but they have a lot of surrogate grasslands like hayfields and pastures where they now breed. So a lot of our work was focused on hayfields. So just a little bit about bobbalink migration connectivity. So they breed here in this orange area in the northern U.S. and southern Canada. And they overwinter all the way down here in central South America. So they have a very long migration that they make of almost 12,500 miles each year round trip. That is a very long flight within one year for these birds, and they do that every year. So a bird that lives five years might make a trip or two around the world in essence for the number of miles they're logging. So really impressive migration by the species. Unfortunately, like many other grassland birds, bobbalinks are declining. They're declining by 1.5% per year. Maybe not quite as dramatic as rusty blackbirds, but still a concerning rate of decline. Fortunately, we still have quite a few bobbalinks. So we have a lot of opportunity for conservation at this point. All right. So let's talk about the study here in Maine. So we have a couple of key objectives. One is we're really interested in fall migration departure dates. As I mentioned, many of them are nesting in hayfields. And obviously, there's a lot of farmers interested in harvesting that hay for livestock and other purposes. So if we can give them information about the timing when bobbalinks and other grassland birds are nesting in their fields and when they're leaving them, that gives them information about when to make plans for harvesting their hay. Our second question is about regional migration strategies and whether different individuals or different populations have different migratory strategies that they're taking in terms of how they're getting back and forth between the breeding and wintering grounds. So our project was focused at the Hart Farm, which is owned by Holden Land Trust. And that's right next door to Fields Pond. So one of their neighbors. It is operated by Becky and Andrew Teuthaker, a really great couple who are really good participants in our project. This is a working farm. They go to the farmer's market. They have CSAs. They sell vegetables, flowers. They harvest their hay. They raise animals, chickens, hogs. So definitely a working farm that this is part of. And this property is also part of the egg allies program. And the egg allies NGO, their focus is on working with landowners, land trusts, farmers to try and increase the nesting success of grassland birds on farms through incentive payments, technical assistance, outreach and education type programs. So this was a great place to focus on bobbling since they were committed to bobbling conservation already. So here's kind of an aerial view. You can see the Hart Farm on the right. You can see Fields Pond Audubon Center on the left. The yellow marker is about where that modus station is located. And the two white polygons that just popped up are the areas where we attempted to capture bobbling in these hay fields. So you can see they're very close proximity to one another. In order to catch the bobbling, we put up misnets. You can kind of see the misnet here in this photo. Out in the middle of the hay fields. So we're trying to catch the birds if they're flying around in the field. And then if anyone's not seen misnets before, they're very similar like a hair net. Really fine and hard to see. That's the purpose, right? We don't want them to see it so that they are they are captured safely. Once we have them in hand, here's Noah Perlett for UNE. He's got a female bobbling that he's banding here. So we give him the band. We take some measurements. We took blood samples from all of them for another project. And then we gave him a tag. So on this male here you can see his tag. You can see the antenna coming down past his tail. And on the right you can see Michelle here releasing a male bobbling. So they're sent back off into their hay fields. And then from there, that point on it's all about modus. So modus is keeping track of them once we release them. So going to our questions. Our first question was fall departure dates. And we tagged 10 individuals, three females, seven males. And we were able to capture likely fall migration departures for five of them. And for the first four, they all departed within about a week upon another on that third week of August. And then there's a fifth bird that waved a little longer about two weeks later that left about the second week of September. And this bird is really interesting. And we're going to come back to him. So keep him in mind. And I'm also going to mention that we have collaborators who are doing the same thing in Vermont and in Pennsylvania. So there's three different locations where this work is occurring. And that's going to be important because I'm going to come back to that. So our second question was about migration strategies. And what are the different patterns that individuals take in terms of how they get to the winter and grounds in the fall? And we've identified two likely strategies from just this past fall. So let me show you the first one. And this is a little bit messy, but the white stars show the three locations where birds were tagged. So we've got the main fields on location here, we've got Sherburne Farm in Vermont, and then the Williston Town Conservation Trust folks here in Pennsylvania. So those are the three sources of the birds. All these red spaghetti lines are different bobble links and the tracks that they took as they migrated. And there's some false tracks here. So don't worry too much about some of these ones that are oddly going west. Those are probably not true movements. So that's a whole other nuance and a whole another conversation about filtering out observations from the system. But anyway, what I want to draw your attention to though, is this big ball of spaghetti right here. And let's zoom in on that. So if we zoom in on that, you can see a lot of birds came down to what is the Del Marva Peninsula here, where it's the juncture of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia here on this peninsula. And you can see a lot of birds converged here. And some birds were there for maybe a day or two, but other birds may have been there for two weeks or more. We think that is an important stopover location. A lot of birds, if you notice, there's a lot of lines coming into that. There are fewer lines heading southwest out of that area. So we think a lot of birds staged on the Del Marva Peninsula and then took the next leg of their migration out across the Atlantic Ocean. So kind of off off to the water and we don't have motor stations out in the Atlantic Ocean. So we kind of lose them at that point. All right, so our first strategy is to migrate over land south. Our main birds were following the east coast. They stage in the Del Marva Peninsula and likely depart over the Atlantic, heading for South America. All right. So in here, you can see this again. So you can see these main birds are kind of following along the east coast here coming down. All right. So we're going to talk about the other migration strategy. And the best way to talk about it is really to give you an example. So we're going to follow the journey of this male bobbling, number 34246. And this is Rachel Stafford. She's an undergraduate at the University of Maine and she helped out with the project. And this is the male that we're going to follow that she has in her hand here. And he received his tag on June 4th at Hart Farm. And the first set of movements, as you would expect, are going to be local movements. So from June 10th through July 21st, we had lots and lots of detections of him from the Field Pond Motor Station. And right around July 21st is when we lost them for a while. And that's not surprising because it's right around this date when the fledglings become really mobile. So at this point, they're not tied to the Hart Farm he feels anymore. Those birds are able to take their broods and start moving around the landscape. And so for a little while, we had no detections from him all the way until August 19th. From August 20th to September 1st, we suddenly had another burst of detections. He went off the air again, September 2nd to the 9th. And then things get really interesting on September 10th. So on September 10th, at 6.30pm, so bobbling like many other songbirds will migrate at night. So at 6.30pm, we got a little burst of signals that suggests that he may have departed on migration from Golden. And this is going to be supported by this next observation I'm going to give you. So at 6.30, he leaves Field Pond. 6 hours later, 12.30 in the morning, he was detected at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in Southern Maine. An hour and 15 minutes later, he was detected at Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary in Massachusetts. An hour, 45 minutes later, he was detected at Zoo New England in Boston. So 2.30 in the morning, so we were cruising through the early morning hours now. And at that point, we don't know where he went that night, but he probably didn't go a whole lot farther, maybe a little bit farther. So what happens after that night? Well, September 13th, so a couple days later, we pick him up again in Delaware. He's at the Norman Wilder Wildlife Area. And he spends three days there. Remember, this was an area that we found a lot of birds spending time at on migration, and clearly an important staging area. And this bird also spent time there, three days at this wildlife area. And then on the 16th, it made a short movement to the interstate fire tower location. So it made a short movement. But then on September 17th, 8.10 p.m., again, suggesting migration because it's a night a night record. And now it's cross Chesapeake Bay. So this looks like a resumption of migration as he's heading south. So he's crossed the bay and is heading south. From September 18th, October 6th, we lose him. So you can see all the circles on the maps. Those are all moda stations. And you can see as he's heading southwest, there are not many moda stations down here. So he kind of enters a black hole where we don't have stations. So he likely stops somewhere in Virginia to South Carolina, somewhere in there, and may make multiple stops. All right. So what happens next? Well, he continues south. Night of October 7th, again, gets very interesting. We have a cluster of moda stations around Charleston up here in the north. We've got Myrtle Beach, where maybe some of you had vacationed at some point, and got Hilton Head here on the south end. And so what happens on the night of October 7th, so midnight, he's detected at Bulls Island 15 minutes later. I'm going to probably pronounce this wrong. Dewey's Island is his next stop, only 15 minutes later. An hour later, Edisto Island, and then 25 minutes later, Harbor Island. So in just a matter of an hour and 40 minutes, this bird has been detected by four different stations along the South Carolina coast. Now you can see there's a line going off here across the Atlantic. And I think that's actually pretty, pretty accurate, probably accurate. We think that that bird probably left mainland US at that point. And we think it was heading towards Cuba in the Caribbean, at least in that direction. So what happens next? Well, bird eventually needs to get to South America. And he was detected in Colombia. This was one of the birds that Sally pointed out in her map. And it was found at this refuge here on the coast. And this is a known bobbling stopover location. So the bird may have stopped there and spent some time. We're not sure. We just got a brief first of detections there. But very exciting. This was the first time a bobbling was detected by the modus system outside of North America. And from this point, you can see the circle is really small now, but there aren't many modus stations in South America. So at that point, we lose track of them. But we assume he continued on his way to the Pampas, the big grassland area kind of in Central South America on the map I showed you previously. So hopefully that's where he's hanging out at the moment down there. So pretty exciting that we got such detailed information from this one bird. And this is the full migratory path that it took from Maine and as it reached South America. So this point points to what our second strategy is. And the second strategy seems to be to follow the East Coast down to South Carolina, Florida, and then to launch off across the Atlantic through the Caribbean down to South America. So a couple of different strategies there. It's possible that as we look at this more closely, we might find other strategies, but these two seem like apparent ones so far. So what are the outcomes of some of this migration research? Well, we're getting species specific migration information. So we can see the differences between a rusty blackbird and a bobbling and a big nose thrush and what the different migration strategies are that they are undertaking. Also the different routes and the different stopover locations they're taking advantage of. And the more we learn about these species, the more we can start making general conclusions that we can then apply to conservation of other species as well. We're also making a lot of connections. Birds are great ambassadors and foreign ambassadors as well. And they're connecting people in places that are resulting in greater opportunities for unifying our conservation efforts. And just look at what this one bobbling did. That one male bobbling story that I told you, these are all of the NGOs and agencies that bird touched with just one fall migration. These are all the folks who are operating those motor stations. So if we're thinking about bobbling conservation and who we should be engaging in conservation of migratory habitat as well as winter habitat, breeding habitat, here we've already got a nice list of potential partners who are providing habitat. And maybe that habitat is stopover habitat or maybe it's air passage habitat. You can't forget that three-dimensional space, air space is really important habitat for these migrating animals. So all of these folks are providing important habitat as well as motor stations. And finally, this really forces us to think about the life cycles of these birds and the full annual cycle that they go through. And that we need to be investing in their conservation, not just in Maine, but we need to be thinking about their conservation well beyond in all the places that they're going. And I was so pleased when Sally highlighted the fact that we're trying to expand MODIS into Central and South America and the Caribbean. And there's a lot of conservation needs outside of the United States and often a lot fewer resources in these other countries. So it's really important for us to think about how can we provide habitat in these other places so that the birds from Maine keep coming back to Maine, right? They're not just our birds. So if we want them to be back in Maine, we need to be thinking about their annual cycle and all of the threats and places that they are spending time. So with that, I just want to say thank you. I want to acknowledge some of the folks that have provided funding. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been a big source of funding for all these different projects. Maine Outdoor Heritage Fund, Maine Audubon, Inland Fisheries and Wildlife have provided resources. Warehouse is an important landowner, participant for our western Maine projects. The Maine Agriculture and Forest Experimental Station supports my position and my research. So they're really important for what I do. And the Northeast Modest Collaboration that Sally talked about. If you have questions, my email address is here. I'm happy to answer questions about other projects that I'm working on as well. So, and I don't know, David, should I answer some of the Q&A? I'm not sure I fully answered a couple of those questions. I think I maybe answered the first one about how to keep the birds from taking their nanotags off. In terms of the nanotag signal, one person made a really good observation. So all of these nanotags are on the same frequency. So how do we differentiate one tag from another? And that is a really brilliant piece of technology that somebody thought of is that the tags give out signals on a burst. And so what you can do is give every tag a slightly different burst signal. So you kind of attenuate that signal differently for each tag. So each tag kind of has its own unique pattern to it. And so the receiver can then decode which individual it's picking up by looking at the pattern of the signal that it's receiving. So hopefully that answers that question. Oh, how many birds do we tag in a busy month? Well, it's not so much in a busy month. Actually, the bobble inks, we managed to tag all of them in one day miraculously. And then there's something like monarchs where you have to wait for the monarchs to emerge from their cocoons. And so it's just kind of random based on when your caterpillars go into a cocoon when the adults emerge. So yeah, so it really varies by animal and species, what that looks like. And then when working with something like Bicknell's Thrush, which is there aren't a lot of them, they're really tough habitats to get at, high mountain areas that are somewhat treacherous to get to. You feel really good if you get one or two tags out in a day when you're working with Bicknell's Thrush. So yeah, so it really depends a lot on the species and where you're working on that one. I don't know, David, what else am I missing here? I think that that was it. Okay, maybe I got us caught up. I was thinking as you were talking about the story of that male bobble ink, I forget his number now. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Okay. Recently, the nature store at Maine Audubon down in Falmouth is having t-shirts made for the Stellar Seagal. And on the back, it shows the different places that it's been cited like Alaska, Texas. Oh, like a map? Right, exactly. So I thought, well, that'd be a great t-shirt to have our male bobble ink with his number and then show the story you just told. I'm sure it would be a limited audience to just those of us that have just heard your story, but I would buy one of those t-shirts. Maybe we need to make a bobble ink t-shirt. Yeah. There's a new question about how long the batteries last. And the batteries really vary a lot, depending on how big they are and the settings that you use for them. So how often it's giving a signal burst out to the universe? So like for a monarch butterfly, they have tiny batteries. They don't last long. That might be only a three to four week tag, really short. On a larger bird, it could last two years. And there's, hopefully we're going to start getting solar powered tags more and more now. So it might be that they just last as long as the bird's still flying around out there. So yeah, so it varies a lot in terms of battery life. It depends on the tag and how you've got the tag set up. Great. So I'm just going to pick up and talk a little bit about education along with Michelle. And of course, both Sally and Amber included education in what they were talking about. And I think that's understandable given that when you think about how technology research and education are all interrelated, the MODIS project is a perfect example of how community engagement and conservation go hand in hand. So the MODIS tower at Fields Pond, the neat thing about having one of these towers in a place that's more public versus one that's maybe out in a field somewhere by its lonesome is that one, obviously visitors that come to Fields Pond will ask questions. There is an interpretive sign at the base of that antenna, but also projects that happen there, like Amber mentioned, Wesley Hutchins, the undergraduate this summer who worked with monarch butterflies. So having him there doing that project was a perfect opportunity to work with both education and conservation hand in hand. So monarch butterflies are pretty ubiquitous at Fields Pond given that we have so much milkweed in our fields. Finding the catapult is just pretty easy. We usually bring some inside each summer for visitors to see and follow their life cycle. And Wesley actually took advantage of this. He took some from our site and brought them home and raised them there and we raised some for his project. And then when he came back to do the tagging and the release, often there would be either visitors or actual students around that we were working with that we were able to pull in and get involved in that. So actually this couple of pictures here shows the one in the upper left Wesley showing the nano tag to some of the summer camp kids. And then the lower right one with the monarch with the tag and the kids actually got into naming each of the butterflies because he came back a number of times to do the release. So each time they got to name a different butterfly and they came up with some pretty unique names for those butterflies and we're really invested in seeing them fly off and become free butterflies. So again having the research taking place in a site that's more public really like I said helps with conservation efforts as well. So Sally and Amber mentioned the website for MODIS and actually you there's a they have a couple websites within their website and they have a specific one related to education. So I just put that up on the screen the link to that and on that page you can link to a lot of different curriculum resources for educators but also you can link to the data sets and look at specific towers as both Sally and Amber mentioned. There's like I mentioned education resources there's a page for educators specifically that goes through a number of different curriculum resources related to you know general birding topics, migration, working with birds in different areas of your curriculum, citizen science, ideas for projects. There's specific pages that are for students. I particularly like the migration presentation where students get actually a set of PowerPoint slides and they get to narrate the different sections of that and really helps them learn it as they're teaching other students that material. These are just some slides from that PowerPoint that for students learning about migration patterns. And some of them are linked to the data specifically on this map you can actually click and then it goes to e bird statistics for your area so you can see which particular species are there and then there's particular there's specific maps to particular species. This one is a Magnolia Warbler and when you click on that again it links to the e bird database some of you may have seen and I'm sure many of you that are birders contribute as I do to e bird you know we put our sightings in all that data goes and gets used and actually creates these maps where you can actually see different dates the populations moving in their migration patterns. It's quite fascinating once you see it in motion students always get a big thrill out of it. I just want to give a little plug speaking of teachers and students we are going to do another presentation that's specific to working with MODIS in your classroom so if you know any of teachers in May we'll be doing that it'll be another zoom but again it'll be specific curricular resources for teachers and I'm going to use that as a segue and turn it over to Michelle who's going to give an example of one specific way that she's worked with students for the past several years we were in the Bangor schools doing the after-school programs with them and Michelle's been working with the group and she's going to tell you a little bit about some of the work she's done. Well thanks for the introduction so I'm going to talk a little bit about how we incorporated some of the MODIS data into our education programs and I'm hoping somebody can give me an indication that they can see my slideshow. Yes. Oh good okay and this picture that I have up is of a couple of students from the Bangor elementary school Fairmont looking for birds in the same field that we tagged the bubble inks in. We unfortunately didn't see any bubble inks that day but we definitely talked about them and one of the benefits of MODIS is because it's so location based there's really an opportunity to connect students with these locations so I'm going to walk you through a lesson that I've done with the MODIS data and here are a couple goals of my MODIS lessons and I really want for students to understand how these MODIS technology works and I really want students to be able to read and analyze real life data and also for students to be able to apply that data and make predictions based on it. So a couple lessons that I've done with these MODIS in mind. First thing I start off with is what is a MODIS tower. My favorite thing is to have students kind of guess what a MODIS tower is by just showing them a picture first. I've gotten a variety of answers but first in introducing them to what a MODIS tower is how it works what it does and one of the activities that I have used to do that is a noise maker activity. So I think Amber mentioned that these tags how they work is they're constantly admitting their own pattern of noise that the tower picks up on so one simple activity that I do to get these kids thinking about how these towers work. Every student gets a little noise maker. These film canisters are filled with rice and some are filled with beans and they all make different noises and the yellow tape noise makers are towers and they get spread out all around the room and the white tape noise makers are wildlife and their job is to move around the room and locate their similar noise maker and it's just a simple way for students to conceptualize how MODIS technology works and also get a couple of their different senses involved in that and after that as we saw with Amber's story a strength of the MODIS data is that you can really tie it to individual birds and that's a really easy way for students to become invested and involved with the data and with science. So the focus species that I use when talking about the MODIS tower is bubble inks and even the word is tailor made for students they love to say it out loud. It's just kind of a fun name for a species. So after talking about what a bubble link is where they live and if we're lucky we can go out to Fields Pond and see where they live then we introduce them to the data. There was a question earlier about how about looking for the how I think Meredith asked it how you can find data online. This is straight from MODIS.org and if you're interested in this I recommend going to that website there's a ton of information on there but these are all of the detections on our Fields Pond MODIS tower. So since I'm working with elementary aged kids I do show them this and some kids I'm always surprised by how invested they are in this especially when I tell them that this data is being used by actual scientists. Something about it holds in air that the kids get very involved in and they're very excited to be doing the same thing as scientists in the field. And from there I made these simplified bubble link tracks so each list on the right is the towers that a particular bubble link went by and same thing if you can each student gets their own bubble link to follow and the towers they went to and by giving them that they are personally now connected to their specific bubble link. So each student was given a bubble link track to see which towers their specific bubble link passed. I picked five tracks from the ten bubble links that we tagged and from that they were given a number key with all the towers that our bubble links passed and a map that showed all of the different towers that our bubble links passed by and from this key in this map all of our students were able to track bubble links and I find it very cool that they look very similar to Amber's maps. You can see those same spaghetti trails down and definitely those that stop over in Delaware. What I love about using modus data with kids is that it really incorporates a bunch of different disciplines. They're learning geography and it also connects where we are in Maine with a broader geographic area. So yeah so these are some of the maps that our fifth graders at Fairmont made and each different color is a different bubble link track. That is all I have to share with you today. I believe we're going into questions next if anybody has any about any of our presenters. David I'd be happy to take that last question. Somebody asked about birds and whether they are tagged while doing general banding. For all of my research we've been very targeted. We've been very interested in specific individuals specific locations and so we've always been very targeted in going after exactly the birds we want but you certainly could blend modus with the general like bird banding station activities and it might be that the questions are such that you know maybe it's you know all the American redstarts that come through get tags or whatnot you know so it really depends on the questions and whether they're conducive for um like a bird banding station to participate in or not but I think there's definitely those opportunities and there's definitely big regional questions where bird banding stations can play a role so. And I might just add to that that one of the dilemmas we've had in enlarging the modus program is which which do we want to come first should the researchers decide what questions they want to answer and which species to target and then they sort of figure out where we should put the stations or do we put the stations up and then we hope that more researchers will take advantage of those stations and come up with more questions so you can you've heard about both of those approaches tonight. It's definitely a chicken and egg problem. So yeah. Exactly. It comes first right and and I think what we found is that we just need to keep doing both things at the same time. Yes yes well Amber I have to say I loved your story of the bobbling I had not seen that before so. Oh well you just started it the story was in your map I just you know I just blew it up. Yes yes no that was really fun to see. I don't see any are there any other questions that went unanswered. There I don't know are jet birds ever tagged by doing general banding. I don't think so because you these these the tags have to be pre-ordered most researchers you know will you know they pre-order their tags for a research project because the the nano tags are pretty expensive. Amber could probably tell you how expensive they are but they're not as bad as satellite tags satellite tags are much more expensive so yeah I I did try to address that question but you do make a good point about you know the logistics of the tagging and but it is feasible I think with the right questions and to work with bird banding stations to deploy tags like if you're looking for tagging certain species while they're migrating you know you could be comparing inland migratory routes to coastal migratory routes and you want to make sure you're getting birds and different with different migration strategies right so so you might work with the general banding station and give them so many tags and say you know the first 10 you know big nels rushes you catch put those tags on yeah so I think you could make that work I think it's just a matter of the questions that you want to answer. Well if there's no other questions I would just end by encouraging folks to visit the MODIS website look at some of the data you can you know track on your own there it's really exciting Michelle just put it up modis.org thank you Michelle and there's a lot to sift through there and you and you could you could look at different research stations like you can specifically look at Fields Pond and went what's gone through Fields Pond in the past week or you could look by species and Amber you have your hand up. Yeah so I just as a for something to look for MODIS is just beta testing right now a new public interactive tool for working with data through the MODIS website and hopefully that'll come out really soon so watch for that it's going to be a really cool tool you're going to be able to do all sorts of fun simulation type stuff with it and I had joy of getting to play with it one day so it's it's going to be a really cool tool so that's going to be something that'll be really nice for anyone that wants to learn more about it so something a preview of things yeah stay tuned for that and keep your eyes open that sounds like fun good well I want to thank everybody for joining us this evening and thank all the panelists and um wish everybody a good night yes and well thanks everybody for coming in thanks David for hosting yeah thank you