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New York Audubon Tracks Harbor Herons by Air
Thanks to NNYN, New York City Audubon has been able to create
its first outreach component with CUNY. Three CUNY students
who took the NNYN-sponsored course at IVE-CUNY on the Nature
of New York spent their summer working with NYC Audubon as summer
interns studying herons.
One of the projects the students were involved in - part of
a major Audubon Society program to monitor Harbor Herons - was
using blimps to track the movement of the birds through New
York.
The following is an article that was broadcast BY NY1, a New
York cable station.
One big bird is helping to track little ones. This summer, FujiFilm
agreed to let New York City Audubon use its blimp to help track
birds and protect their habitats as part of the long running
Harbor Heron Project.
"In this project what we do is we monitor the condition and
the state of the harbor herons, which are heron, egrets and
ibises - the big beautiful kind of white birds," Yigal Gelb
of NYC Audubon said. "So, when we proposed this project we really
wanted their assistance with both aerial monitoring and also
helping us with monitoring the flight lines of these birds,
because these birds really nest on the islands, but they feed
sometimes eight, sometimes 10, sometimes 15 miles away. Not
all the feeding grounds they actually use are known to us, so
one way we thought the FujiFilm blimp would be really helpful
to us would be to allow us to track them mid-air all the way
to where they feed. Once we find out where they feed we can
start proposing conservation plans to protect the areas."
The blimp's sky high vantage point also allowed researchers
to more easily track the birds they'd already tagged for electronic
monitoring.
"This is a radio telemetry receiver. It picks up VHF frequencies
from these transmitters which we attach to birds," Andrew Bernick,
a CUNY graduate student said. "It works better on the blimp
because from higher elevations you can get a clearer signal,
and you can track them from farther away."
But above all, researches say a blimp gives them access to a
crowded city like New York like no other vehicle can; not a
car, not a boat, not even a plane.
"If you had to use a car the car would be stopping the minute
you reach a shoreline," Gelb said. "If you had to do it by boat
it would stop as soon as you hit land. So the blimp was just
completely indifferent to any of these obstacles."
In fact, NYC Audubon says before this year, only about 50 percent
of the islands where the birds wandered were being monitored.
Now, thanks in large part to the blimp, they can track birds
virtually anywhere they go.
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