As rare Florida bird loses ground to development, can technology help scientists save it?
Reed Bowman and Young Ha Suh weren’t sure what they’d find when the two biologists were finally ready to test out their unusual experiment to save the Florida scrub-jay.
They’d spent months converting the land around Central Florida’s Archbold Biological Station into a giant outdoor laboratory. They installed transmitters, put up a huge antenna and began attaching tiny radio devices on as many young scrub-jays as they could catch.
Then it was time to see if the elaborate system could actually track the birds on their daily rounds. They leaned over the computer and downloaded the first results.
“I said, ‘Oh my God, look at all the data that’s coming in,’’ said Suh, a Ph.D. candidate conducting the research. “I’d never seen anything like this. It was really promising.’’
The scrub-jay, the only species of bird found exclusively in Florida, has been in steady decline despite a generation of conservation. So the Archbold research center just north of Lake Okeechobee turned to a brand new technology to analyze the scrub-jay as never before.
Over the coming year, the project will use the radio telemetry system to follow every waking move of young jays as they explore their territories. Already, they’re making discoveries that will help make the most of the remaining scrub-jay habitat across Florida’s midsection.
“Nobody’s ever done anything like this before,’’ said Bowman, a research biologist at Archbold who has studied the scrub-jay for three decades. “It’s pretty cutting edge.’’
Bird research is undergoing a transformation due to a variety of technologies. Scientists are using radar, satellite maps and digital sound recorders to track birds around the world. They’ve enlisted tens of thousands of birdwatchers, armed with smartphone apps, to record where species are and what they’re doing in dozens of countries.
But the project at Archbold Biological Station, working with a New Jersey company called Cellular Tracking Technologies, goes in a different direction: It zeroes in on individual birds in their local terrain to learn how to protect them during a time of unprecedented change.
The Florida scrub-jay turns out to be the perfect candidate for this research.
A striking, chatty bird
Reed Bowman pilots his Ford pickup over the sandy soil around the Archbold Station until he arrives at the center of the scrub-jay habitat. He’s been following the jays on this land for so long he knows every one of their territories, personalities, even their lineages.
The birds know him, too.
Within minutes of stepping from the cab, a scrub-jay lands on a fence post, and then hops right onto Bowman’s sleeve to retrieve the peanut in his hand. Then the bird just stays there, its head cocked, staring down the biologist.
The Florida scrub-jay is a striking species, highly social and at times a chatterbox of a bird, with sky-blue and light gray plumage that helps it stand out while perched, often singing, on the highest bushes in the wild.
An acrobatic flyer, the birds are constantly exploring during their first years as they look for open territory to claim. Like teenagers everywhere, the young jays tend to hang out with a small group of peers. Unlike most species, they also spend time near their home nests to help raise their younger siblings.
The biologists believe that the key to protecting the jay lies in just those kinds of everyday behaviors.
“These birds have very, very specific habitat requirements,’’ explained Bowman.
For thousands of years, the scrub-jay thrived in what was to become Florida. The jays had the run of the elevated ridge of land that extends up the center of the peninsula. With the scrub’s unique combination of low-laying bushes, grass and occasional trees, the flora was cultivated by constant fires from lightning, and the species came to be a keystone species.
But as the state’s population has boomed, more than 90 percent of that scrub land has been converted to development. A similar percent of the scrub-jay population has been lost, and just 4,000 of the birds remain.
Today, Florida public lands scattered across 19 counties, often in small isolated tracts, are suitable for the jays. Wildlife managers go to such extremes as moving whole jay families to safer places when development endangers them. Audubon Florida has deputized thousands of bird watchers in a program called Jay Watch to monitor how the birds are doing.
And yet the number of jays continues to decline.
After a career studying the birds, Bowman and his team have concluded that the answer lies in learning exactly how the jays use the land, and how wildlife managers can create habitat that most closely matches the fabric of the scrub on which the species evolved.
Up until now, researchers studied birds like these jays by field observation, which is a cumbersome way to follow birds as active as scrub-jays. “You could only track a handful of birds at a time,’’ said Young Ha Suh. “It was really time-consuming.’’
“Then along comes this technology that will enable us to track all the birds simultaneously, in real time,’’ said Bowman. “We can know exactly what these birds are doing. That’s a huge part of the puzzle we’ve been studying for 30 years.’’
Remaking the bird map
The Archbold offices just outside Lake Placid have been the control room for the jay research for decades. File drawers are full of paper cards on scrub-jays dating back to the 1970s. Maps identifying every jay and their locations hang on the walls.
But the data now flowing in comes by the millions of bits.
The birds are tagged with solar-powered devices that weigh less than a gram. A signal is triggered when birds pass by one of the hundreds of transmitters posted on 9-foot poles every 200 yards across the grounds. The signal is sent to a base-station antenna on top of a nearby water tower and then into the system set up by Cellular Tracking Technologies.
“It’s the big data aspect that allows us to explore more deeply what’s going on,’’ said David La Puma, a lifelong birder and director of global markets development at the company.
From the first days tracking the birds, the project started picking up unexpected behaviors. “We could see that a lot of the birds were outside their territories,’’ said Suh. “They seemed to be going everywhere.’’
The young jays would zigzag all over the scrub range. They formed cliques with other young birds and clearly communicated with one another. As the time approached to start breeding on their own, the birds became especially competitive about lining up mates.
“It turns out, they have very complicated social lives that aren’t that different from ourselves,’’ said Bowman.
Anders Gyllenhaal, a former executive editor of The Miami Herald and vice president of news for McClatchy, is an avid birder and nature photographer and co-operates the birding website FlyingLessons.US .
This story was originally published May 5, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
