Ninying Benedicta

@Benedicta
| She

My name is Ninying Benedicta a PhD student under the Department of wildlife resource management in Cameroon. I love learning about wildlife and their habitats. I also love working with communities surrounding the forests, learning on Traditional Ecological Knowledge.

Groups

Biologging

Hi everyone, i pray this message reaches you well. Please I am looking for alternative ideas as to which other tracker to use on the African grey parrots to track their movement patterns as part of my PhD studies. The initial trackers which was chosen was the Argos pinpoint 150, but securing funding to get at least 10 of these trackers has really been challenging. Any suggestions will be really appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Lars Holst Hansen

@Lars_Holst_Hansen

Aarhus University

Biologist and Research Technician working with ecosystem monitoring and research at Zackenberg Research Station in Greenland

6 November 2023 1:31pm

If you can do with local UHF based communication, Milsar may be worth looking into.

https://milsar.com/

Cheers,

Lars

Thomas Gray

@ThomasGray_Argos

Woods Hole Group

Argos satellite system manager for North America

17 November 2023 4:26pm

My understanding is that the Argos (Lotek) Pinpoint tags are some of the least expensive ones available, but you might also try Cellular Tracking Technologies (Microwave Telemetry & GeoTrak also product Argos tags for parrots, but I believe they are more expensive).

Keep in mind that keeping tags on parrots is going to be probably a bigger challenge than raising funds to get tags for parrots...

ps: here's a full list of Argos manuf, for reference -

Argos Transmitters for Wildlife Tracking, Oceanography...

Access all Argos transmitters: beacons for tracking animals, drifting or moored oceanographic buoys, ice buoys, subsurface drifting floats.

Argos

Rob Appleby

@Rob_Appleby | He/him

Wild Spy

18 November 2023 2:18am

Hi @Benedicta

Does the area you are tracking in have cellphone reception? If so, something like this might be suitable (with a bit of modification to the housing):

Lightbug - Long battery, small, no subscription IoT

Tiny & powerful GPS Trackers with smartphone and web apps. Easily track and monitor pretty much anything! | Lightbug IoT - Small 4G GPS Trackers with the best battery life and no subscription

If there's no cellphone coverage, You might also be able to adapt these (or talk to the company about adapting them):

GPS ear tags for cattle tracking | mOOvement

The mOOvement GPS Ear Tags allow you to to track and trace your cattle over long distances

A note though that these rely on base stations to collect data.

All the best for your studies!

Cheers,

Rob

Kyler Abernathy

@KylerA | he/him

National Geographic Society

1 December 2023 8:10pm

Hi Ninying,

One benefit of the Pinpoint tags is that they are user-rechargeable, something pretty much unheard of for satellite tags for decades! If you can recover the tags, you might be able to achieve a larger samples size with fewer tags (less $$) by redeploying the recovered tags - without the costs of having the manufacturer refurbish them.

cheers,

Kyler