Signal Boost

This past summer, a Wilson’s Phalarope nicknamed Mateo found social media acclaim after he traveled more than 8,000 miles from Utah’s Great Salt Lake to Argentina and back.

The discovery of the shorebird’s feat was possible thanks to the international Sistema de seguimiento de fauna silvestre Motus, a program of Aves de Canadá that has revolutionized scientific knowledge about animal migration since it debuted in 2014. Tracked birds, bats, and insects wear tiny tags that “ping” thousands of cell-tower-like Motus stations when they fly past, enabling tracking in near-real time.

Mateo is one of 28 Wilson’s Phalaropes tagged by Utah’s Tracy Aviary over the last two years as part of a study examining the movements of shorebirds at Great Salt Lake and beyond. Project leader Tully Frain and other conservation ecologists at the aviary knew that phalaropes flew long distances, but they didn’t know the route they took. They were astonished to learn that Mateo veered east and flew over the Gulf of Mexico from Texas, instead of heading south along the Pacific coast.

Through September 2025, Motus users have tagged more than 60,000 animals of 472 species in 34 countries. More than 2,270 Motus stations are operating, collecting data for at least 1,000 scientific projects. Hundreds of collaborators (nonprofits, bird clubs, universities, government agencies, and others) participate in the program, and more than 2,000 landowners support Motus by allowing receiver stations to be placed on their property. And nearly 260 research papers have been published using Motus data, explaining new understandings of animal migrations.

ABC guides Motus efforts in the U.S., and since 2023, Smith and his team have installed or directly supported the installation of 122 Motus stations in 20 states or territories and three countries.

Smith leads three other ABC staff focused on Motus. As the U.S. Director, Smith works closely with the Motus leadership at Birds Canada to help grow a network of Motus partners and users in the Western Hemisphere. He supports partners in deploying Motus stations and looks for collaborative opportunities to leverage the technology to help fill critical information gaps for species of conservation concern. The goal is to make Motus a standard system for delivering real-world conservation outcomes, especially for vulnerable or imperiled species.

Blake spends weeks on the road every year, logging thousands of miles. Before each trip, he packs a trailer, filling it with antennas, huge batteries, bolts, and cables; he plans his route through mountains, grasslands, and other remote areas; and he stocks food, including produce from his hobby farm, and lots of coffee.

Blake has been involved in about 80 installations since 2018. Last year, he and a few partners installed four new stations in a key migratory spot in Oregon that was considered a critical gap in the network, including one at the 40,000-acre Klamath Marsh National Wildlife Refuge in south-central Oregon. There Blake worked with Kaly Adkins, a regional wildlife biologist for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW), Ken Popper, a local bird biologist, and the late Bob Sallinger, founder of Bird Conservation Oregon, spending two days installing the Motus station.

They hauled equipment from Blake’s trailer, using a red dirt road as a work station, and mounted solar panels and attached bulky antennas to an abandoned electrical pole. Cables connected it all to a computer. The crew then tested and tinkered and soon brought the station online.

For the Motus network to work, it needs station infrastructure and the wildlife tags themselves. Blake is part of both efforts. Trained and permitted researchers like him around the world tag individual birds, bats, and insects. While tags vary in size and type, they’re often tiny, solar-powered transmitters with an antenna, weighing less than 3-5 percent of the animal’s body weight. They can be attached like a little backpack. Tags send information when the individual flies close enough to a Motus station.

Motus tags enable researchers to study the animals’ movements without having to recapture them. Other tracking technology for small animals — GPS loggers and geolocators — store data, meaning an animal has to be caught again so its movement data can be downloaded. By contrast, Motus transmitters enable real-time tracking by wirelessly sending the data to any nearby Motus receivers. Depending on the transmitter and station configuration, most stations listen to a swath of sky about 18 miles wide.

Within days, the Klamath Marsh station picked up the signal of a passing Lewis’s Woodpecker. Excited texting followed. The tower’s first visitor happened to be a species Blake studied for his master’s thesis. “I’m always pretty relieved and excited to know a station is working,” Blake said. “It’s what I really like about my job — that I get to use hands-on technology to help people study and save bird species and habitats.”

As luck would have it, the woodpecker, Motus bird number 55979, was from a study biologist Kaly Adkins herself is leading for ODFW on Lewis’s Woodpecker migrations. Cameron Piper, a researcher from California, tagged the bird while working on the project for her master’s degree.

Piper and her all-women research team counted and monitored nests and tagged nine Lewis’s Woodpeckers in 2024 to better understand the home ranges and movement patterns of an Oregon population. Some birds are year-round residents. Others leave. But scientists didn’t yet know why that is, when the woodpeckers depart, or where some go in winter. Piper’s work, and Motus technology, helped provide new insight.

One of the most-tagged species is the Nudo rojo, a once-abundant shorebird now classified as Near Threatened, that has been a focus of conservation work (including at ABC) for decades. In the last few years, studies following Motus-tagged birds found that the shores of Delaware Bay — a famous stopover region for knots — were not the only major sites that the species relies on for refueling during spring migration. In fact, beaches in Florida and especially South Carolina also host great numbers of the birds when they’re heading north each year.

Motus detections recently confirmed that many Red Knots use the southeastern coast as a “launchpad” of sorts before their long flights north. They’ve been tracked through the eastern Great Lakes Basin or heading north along the Atlantic coast on their way toward James Bay, Hudson Bay, and their ultimate breeding sites in the boreal and arctic regions.

The discovery led to recent legal decisions in South Carolina that have curtailed the harvesting of horseshoe crabs — the birds’ primary food source — on key beaches from mid-March through May for the next five years. This significant win for bird conservation happened thanks to the Motus network.

Another species that stands to benefit from Motus-powered research is the Endangered Saltmarsh Sparrow. The orange-faced songbird is restricted to its namesake saltmarsh habitats from Maine to Florida. Earlier this year, Smith and several colleagues published new findings about the bird’s migration and stopover behaviors that can guide where and when to prioritize protection and restoration of coastal marsh complexes, among other conservation actions for the bird.

They reported that the sparrows primarily move along the Atlantic coast, but some also appear to make inland and over-ocean migratory flights, particularly between southern New England and the mid-Atlantic. The team detected key stopover sites in coastal Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and along the Delmarva Peninsula, showing that most fall stopovers were brief — usually less than two days — and grew shorter as the season progressed. The work provides the clearest picture to date of the species’ migration timing, routes, and stopover ecology.

For an easily overlooked species with a population of fewer than 69,000 individuals, the new research can be a lifeline.

Recently in Costa Rica, a team of researchers turned to Motus to learn more about the Golden-winged Warbler, a declining songbird with a flashy yellow head and a Zorro-like eye mask that has been the focus of conservation efforts for many years.

Stu Mackenzie, Director of Strategic Assets for Birds Canada and the leader of Motus, joined biologists from SELVA, a Colombian nonprofit, ABC, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and others as they installed stations and tagged Golden-wings on their nonbreeding grounds. The team tagged 69 birds across habitats, from high-elevation forest to shade-grown coffee farms.

The researchers looked at whether the warbler’s winter habitat impacts migration timing. They expected that birds departing first in spring would subsequently arrive first on the breeding grounds. Instead, the Motus technology revealed that Golden-wings wintering in wetter and more forested areas would depart later in spring and would arrive around the same time or earlier than birds that left early. The findings show that Golden-wings have more than one strategy for migrating successfully, thanks in part to the habitat quality in their nonbreeding areas. The study adds an important new piece of information to our knowledge of this well-studied yet threatened songbird.

In the decade-plus since Motus launched, its value for scientific study and conservation planning has continued to grow year after year. In addition to teaching researchers how animals navigate landscapes and barriers, it also informs them how to protect species in decline, like safeguarding the precise habitats they use.

“One of the most groundbreaking things about Motus is that it provides us with the ability to monitor from local to regional and even continental movements, and find miraculous insights in between,” Mackenzie said.

In many ways, Motus is perfect for studying wildlife wallflowers: the small species. The weird ones. The shy ones. The ones, frankly, we know the least about. The ones that don’t fit, literally, into historical movement research methodology. Sure, challenges pop up: keeping stations online in winter, false detections, technological glitches, slow website load times. But progress is happening, one tag and tower at a time.

Thanks to the vast Motus network of researchers, installers, funders, and others, it’s clear that this revolution in migration studies will continue. Smith and his crew, for example, expect to help install more than 30 new stations in the U.S., Mexico, and the Caribbean in 2026. Adkins is diving into a Northwest-wide project to tag and study migratory patterns of hoary and silver-haired bats. And Piper has put another nine tags on Lewis’s Woodpeckers this year and is waiting to see what happens.

Mackenzie said it best: “The most powerful thing is the true collaborative nature of this work and seeing how the conservation community can rally behind an idea.”

ABC thanks the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Tareen-Filgas Foundation, Birds Canada, U.S. Forest Service, USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Sam Shine Foundation, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Robert Hemphill and Leah Bissonette, and the state wildlife agencies of Alabama, Florida, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Texas for supporting our Motus projects.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of Bird Conservation, the Member magazine of American Bird Conservancy. Learn more about the benefits of becoming an ABC Member and join today.