A wildlife tracking station in North Bay

There is a international monitoring network that tracks birds and now North Bay is part of it.

On Friday, officials at the Laurentian Escarpment Conservation Area unveiled the Motus Wildlife tracking system thanks to $10,000 in funding from from various residents and organizations in the area.

Stu McKenzie is with Bird Studies Canada.

He says the data is put on line at www.motus.org

“As birds are migrating in certain areas we can track them with pretty high precision. But as they leave we can get a check in and find out how fast they’re moving and what routes they’re taking,” he says.
He says in the past 4 years they’ve tagged over 13,000 migratory birds, bats and insects and each animal has a unique audio signature as they travel through the tracking stations.

Fred Pinto of the Nipissing Naturalists says they will learn about the paths species take.

“This tracking station here will track anything within 15 km of the station. Anything that comes through day or night. A number of animals will travel through at night and they’ll travel over North Bay. This way we’ll know they’ve gone through North Bay and this is a corridor for them,” Pinto says.

Species have digitally encoded radio transmitters that can be detected at stations and this one in North Bay is 1 of 450 around the world.