Some salt marsh sparrows out on New Hampshire’s seacoast are now flying around with brand new backpacks. The accessory is actually a solar-powered tag the size of a fingernail, which will help University of New Hampshire researchers provide important data for marsh restoration projects across New England.
In late June, the research team set out at five in the morning to tag the tiny birds on Lubberland Creek Preserve, a marsh site in Newmarket managed by The Nature Conservancy.
But PhD student Talia Kuras and her team are used to the early mornings. That’s when the birds are the most active, she explains.
The trail down to the marsh – or to Bird City, as the team calls the site – is almost a secret path: wild shrubs, bushes and trees and no markings pointing to the expanse of green and saltwater hidden below.
Across the country, century-old salt marshes have been lost to development. Even healthy marshes, like this one in Newmarket, are at risk of disappearing because of climate-change fueled sea level rise.
Kuras says restoring and preserving these sites is crucial to ensure the survival of all the human and non-human communities that depend on marshes for their existence or way of life, including salt marsh sparrows.
The relationship between these sparrows and salt marshes is so significant that they are classified as an indicator species, which means that the health of the bird’s populations can provide information about the health of the entire ecosystem.
The backpacks – or backpack-like tags – Kuras and her team are placing on the birds is a way to track the birds’ movements on the marsh. They have also placed sensors across the marsh field, which pick up on the signal from the tags as the birds fly by.
It’s like checking the location of an air tag on your phone. With that information, the team can then draw conclusions about the birds’ behavior at a healthy marsh: how they nest, breed and feed across the flooding cycle, for example.
“They have a very good population size here, and we want to be able to compare their space use to other marshes that we monitor that are experiencing different methods of tidal marsh restoration,” Kuras says.
But for all of that to happen, Kuras’ team first needs to catch some sparrows. They start by placing vertical, portable nets on a section of the marsh. Kuras assures that the process is very safe, and they keep an eye on the nets to rescue any birds that might be showing signs of stress.
Sometimes, the sparrows need a bit of encouragement to get into the air. So the scientists get to clapping and hitting sticks. It doesn't take too long after that for a few birds to hit the nets.
Once they catch the bird, which gets placed on a small cloth bag, they take it to their tagging station a few feet away. After making sure it is heavy enough to receive a tag, seasonal field technician Danny Tipton starts tagging the first bird of the day.
The tag, which sits on top of the bird’s bag, has two loops which go through each of the bird’s legs.
They discuss a little, realizing a better comparison might be to a climbing harness than to a backpack. At the end, though, they conclude that in the absence of hands, birds could only wear a backpack this way. The comparison stands.
Before releasing the sparrow, Tipton conducts one final check. “We'll make sure that the tag feels like it's fit, that it's not too tight on the bird and not too loose to where it’ll cause any issues,” he says.
The bird then flies away, “off to collect some data,” Tipton adds.
More often than not, the team will catch a bird that has already been tagged. They use the opportunity to update their records, measuring and weighting the birds. Kuras explains that data is also used by different projects. Some researchers, for example, are looking into how salt marsh sparrows breed with nelson sparrows.
The team keeps at this for hours, catching, tagging, releasing and repeating the process all over again.
“We always joke that we are going to make our marsh gift shop and we're gonna sell dried sea salt from the grass and marsh algae paper,” Kuras jokes. “And that's how we're gonna raise all the money to save all the birds.”
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