Ultralight Archival Data Loggers for Songbirds

This project designs open hardware archival data loggers — tags — for birds too small to carry a GPS or telemetry tag. The tags weigh under a gram, record to on-board flash rather than transmitting, and are read out once the bird is recaptured. Three families are documented here: BitTag for season-long activity logging, PresTag for barometric pressure and flight altitude, and IMUTag for high-rate inertial sensing fine enough to resolve individual wingbeats. The board designs, firmware and host software are all open.

Rapid improvements in low-power, inexpensive, movement and environmental sensors has sparked a revolution in animal behavior research by enabling the creation of novel data-loggers (tags) that can capture fine-grained activity and location data over many months. Nevertheless, development of tags that are suitable for use with small species of birds remains challenging because of the extreme weight (and hence energy) constraints.

Dark-eyed Junco — Jocelyn Anderson

This website documents the use, design, and fabrication of custom tags below the mass and power budgets of most low-energy devices – \(1g\) and \(1\mu W\), respectively – that can collect continuous data for up to a year. The tags we present are archival, which means that the data they collect can only be downloaded by retrieving the tags. Tags with telemetry interfaces are not generally practical for long-lived data collection at the scale we describe.

Example Tag

Our biology partners study the behavior and ecology of dark-eyed juncos (\(20-25g\)), pine siskins (\(12-18g\)), great tits (\(16-21g\)), and robins. Cornell Lab of Ornithology 2019

Cornell Lab of Ornithology (2019). All about birds. All About Birds. https://www.allaboutbirds.org