Newspaper Article 2001 – It takes a Kiwi to find out where birds go at night

It takes a Kiwi to find out where birds go at night

Bob Brockie’s world of science

During the 1914-18 war a French airman reported that “As we came down to about 10000 feet in a full moon we suddenly found ourselves among a strange flight of birds which seemed to be motionless. We were soon in the middle of the flock and the following day I found one of them in the machine. It was a swift”.

This report prompted wide interest among ornithologists who had always wondered if swifts “roosted” in the air at night or even slept up there. During the following 80 years, European birdwatchers used telescopes and  radar to see if swifts spent all night up in the sky. They found plenty of tantalising clues but could never really confirm the story.

Now, in the bird journal Ibis, Australian Michael Tarburton and his German offsider, Erich Kaiser, think they have the answer. They glued tiny radio transmitters to fledgling swifts in Germany then tracked the birds during their first flight out of the nest. Sure enough, the fledglings flew straight up to join the other birds high in the sky, stayed up there all night and returned to lower altitudes the  following morning.

But, I hear you cry, why report on tracking German swifts? New Zealand has no swifts… Well, some New Zealanders are very interested because they built and supplied the radios and aerials. As part of the Crown Research Institute known as Landcare, my  colleague Dave Ward and his team of 14 micro-engineers make the world’s best and most versatile animal-tracking electronic gear (called “sirtrack”). During the past 20 years, he and his team have built thousands of these little radios and aerials in, of all places, Havelock North. From Hawke’s Bay, the radios go to all corners of the world. They’ve been fitted to reindeer in Lapland, tigers in Nepal, penguins in the Antarctic, turtles in the China Sea and wildebeests in Tanzania. In fact, the radios have been attached to 370 different kinds of animal, including elephants, crocodiles, albatrosses, seals, tuis, bats, wetas, as well as wandering intellectually handicapped children.

Some radios are large and run for years, but others are tiny. You need not worry about German swifts with radios glued to their backs. Their radios weigh just over a gram and are designed to fall off after a few days.