Appleton-Whittell Research Ranch Motus Station

A program of Birds Canada, Motus (Latin for “movement”) is a network of radio stations equipped to pick up signals sent from tiny, radio-emitting tags that can be affixed to insects, bats, and of course birds. With a little help from the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies, our Motus station atop Bald Hill was installed in March of 2022 as part of their Great Plains-Chihuahuan Desert Motus network. Since then, it’s been picking up birds tagged elsewhere by other researchers (including a federally threatened Western Yellow-billed Cuckoo tagged at Audubon’s Kern River Preserve in California), and we’ve been dreaming up ways to put it to use for our own investigations. 

The Bald Hill Motus station was first put to work in 2024 when nearly 20 Research Ranch sparrows (Botteri’s, Cassin’s, and Grasshopper) were equipped with radio signal-emitting Motus tags. This marked the start of our Research Ranch Grassland Sparrow Motus Project, a collaboration with the Arizona Game and Fish Department, Sonoran Joint Venture, and Arizona State University aimed at better understanding the long-distance and local movements of priority grassland sparrows including Botteri’s, Cassin’s, and Grasshopper. These species are shown by most field guides to be year-round residents in our area, but it’s likely much more complicated with at least a significant portion of our Botteri’s Sparrow heading south for the winter, our breeding Grasshopper Sparrow being seasonally replaced by wintering visitors from the north, and our Cassin’s Sparrow doing their best to follow the rain. As part of this project, we are exploring a newer piece of technology known as Motus “nodes”, essentially mini Motus stations that can be deployed across an area to track birds’ exact locations. We hope that this tool will help us better understand how these birds are responding to changes on the Research Ranch and to our management activities. Understanding these local and long-distance movements is key to our efforts to protect these birds across their full lifecycle, on and off the Research Ranch. 

We continue to tag and track birds through the Research Ranch Grassland Sparrow Motus Project, and we encourage others to put our equipment to work! Stay tuned for reports resulting from this work, follow our Motus station here, and if you are a researcher looking to conduct Motus studies at the Research Ranch, reach out at researchranch@audubon.org.