Photo Credit: Eric Matteson
Zumbro Valley Audubon Society recognized for 2024 accomplishments
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(ABC 6 News) – Every year the National Audubon Society picks out its top stories from local chapters across the country, and this year, for the first time, a local southeast Minnesota chapter has been recognized.
The Zumbro Valley Audubon Society has been working with contemporaries in Guatemala for several years.
In March of this year, a team of volunteers traveled to the Tikal National Park in Guatemala to set up a Motus Wildlife Tracking receiver on an existing radio tower.
The receiver, one of hundreds across Central America, Mexico, the United States and Canada, will be used to make tracking migrating birds much easier than traditional methods.
“We put little transmitters on the birds, in the form of chips that are detected by receivers on towers,” said ZVAS board member Eric Matteson, who helped coordinate the trip and participated. “So the recovery rate for the individual birds that are fitted with transmitters is much higher.”
The extra receiver will be able to help researchers find patterns in the birds behavior as they travel up and down various “flyways.”
Matteson says the Zumbro Valley chapter will be continuing their collaboration with the Guatemalan researchers into the future, and even hopes to bring some of them to Minnesota next year.