20 October 2023
The general public who to find discarded fowl monitoring era don’t know what they’re taking a look at and even if they do they don’t most often repurpose it. However each now and again a transmitter is going roaming.
White storks (Ciconia ciconia) that breed in Poland migrate to jap and southern Africa for the wintry weather. For some, their ultimate vacation spot is the Blue Nile River valley, turned around in yellow at the map under.
In April 2017 a white stork in Poland, nicknamed Kajtka, used to be tagged with a transmitter containing a cell SIM card.
That autumn she flew to the Blue Nile River valley in Sudan the place she become mysteriously inactive. Sooner or later she stopped shifting altogether and had both died or the transmitter fell off. Researchers couldn’t determine what took place till they were given the telephone invoice.
Questions have been raised when Kajtka lingered within the house for greater than 8 weeks, handiest roaming round 25 km [15 miles] in more than a few instructions.
In 2018, the thriller used to be solved when EcoLogic Team gained a telephone invoice for 10,000 Polish zloty, the similar of £2,064 [$2,500]. Anyone had picked up the tracker in Sudan and brought the chance to make 20 hours of telephone calls the use of the SIM card.
Thankfully for cash-starved fowl analysis this kind of episode is uncommon.
If Kajtka had survived she would have joined her fellow white storks shifting north in March, possibly with a stopover within the Hula Valley proven under. Beautiful!
(credit are within the captions)