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In the late 1990s, as an ecologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Martin Wikelski guesses he drove every mile of the Prairie State’s backroads in a two-toned Oldsmobile. But these were no joyrides; they were high-adrenaline all-nighters in the name of science.

Each spring and fall evening, having outfitted another Swainson’s Thrush with a tiny radio transmitter, Wikelski drove like a “tornado chaser,” staying close enough to record the bird’s heartbeat, wingbeats, and vocalizations. His shift ended when the migrating thrush touched down, often hundreds of miles from where he’d tagged it—except when flashing red and blue lights in the rear-view mirror cut short his gonzo fieldwork.

These days researchers no longer have to go to such extremes. Thanks to powerful new technology, an untold number of birds now wear some kind of sensor. The gadgets are smaller, cheaper, and capable of gathering more information than ever before—and they don’t require trailing a creature in real time. It’s the “golden era” of animal tracking, says Wikelski, director of the Department of Migration at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. This year, through , he and his colleagues will launch the first of several miniature satellites to track thousands of animals across the globe. Their aim is to create an “Internet of Animals” and discover the hidden worlds of the planet’s wildlife. 

Increasingly, scientists are using these instruments not only to study the animal itself, but also to gather valuable environmental data. Traits that once made birds a scientific mystery—their perpetual movement and proclivity for remote locations—are now a boon for research, revealing the “living pulse of the planet,” Wikelski says.

Around the world, wild animals are proving themselves to be worthy scientific colleagues. By recruiting birds as research assistants, today’s scientists are gaining a better understanding of how Earth’s climate and ecosystems function, and how to keep these interconnected systems working for all creatures—us included.

Position Title: Aerial Survey Pilot

Ideal Candidate: Great Frigatebird

Job Description: Measure the height of the planetary boundary layer, the lowest stratum of the atmosphere, which strongly influences weather patterns and air quality.

Core Competency: Unafraid of heights. With long wings that make soaring a breeze, Great Frigatebirds can reach dizzying altitudes and stay aloft for weeks at a time. That made them perfect assistants for a project that ecologist Morgan Gilmour undertook in 2022. Then working for the U.S. Geological Survey in the marine protected area surrounding Palmyra Atoll, a chain of Pacific islands, Gilmour was tasked with testing whether the reserve’s boundaries were in the right place to protect its diverse wildlife. To find out, she strapped GPS trackers onto frigatebirds to see if they strayed beyond the border. (They did—a lot.) A year later Gilmour joined NASA to work on the agency’s own Internet of Animals project. She showed the frigatebird data to a new colleague, Ian Brosnan, a marine scientist and earth systems expert. Brosnan immediately suspected that the birds could also offer a cache of valuable insight about the planetary boundary layer, a turbulent zone of the atmosphere that plays a significant role in shaping weather. Ground-based instruments and satellites can measure the layer’s ever-changing height, but they don’t work well at night, in cloudy weather, or over open ocean. Frigatebirds wearing backpacks, on the other hand, could collect data in nearly any conditions to help meteorologists make more accurate forecasts. 

Duties: To test Brosnan’s hunch, he and Gilmour compared the tagged frigatebirds’ flight patterns with 13 years of climatological records, confirming that the birds consistently climbed to the cusp of the boundary layer. Inspired by this discovery, the researchers are now developing new sensors that will collect a slew of data, including temperature, humidity, altitude, air pressure, and wind speed, allowing them to build a highly accurate profile of the atmosphere. Things have come a long way from the days when Gilmour had to remove circuit boards from cat-tracking collars to MacGyver her own bird tags. “This is something we can’t get from remote regions of the ocean any other way,” she says. “It’s a really great time to be an animal-tracking researcher.” 

Position Title: Crossing Guard 

Ideal Candidate: Western Gull 

Job Description: Detect whales traveling in the Pacific Ocean to help prevent vessel strikes, a leading cause of death for the massive marine mammals on the West Coast.

Core Competency: Hearty appetite. Western Gulls tend to throw up when handled, something San Jose State University ecologist Scott Shaffer knows well from more than 15 years of tagging the birds off the Northern California coast. Far from being a nuisance, all that vomit has helped him understand the unique foraging habits of the seabirds, which he tracks with GPS tags. (He caught one opportunistic gull hitching a 75-mile ride on a trash truck to a composting facility—twice.) Several years ago, while Shaffer was tagging birds on the Farallon Islands, about 30 miles west of San Francisco, large groups of humpback whales were moving through the area. “The birds I was catching were pretty much all yacking up krill,” he says. A few days later, “the wind shifted, the whales disappeared, and the gulls started puking up other stuff.” Shaffer realized the gulls were foraging in association with the whales, which herd krill to the surface and scoop up the tiny crustaceans in their gargantuan maws, inevitably leaving some behind for the birds.

Duties: Shaffer and colleagues at NOAA examined the overlap between gull movement and vessel traffic between 2014 and 2019. They found that 40 percent of tracked gulls came within about one kilometer of a vessel on the open sea, largely within established shipping lanes, and that nearly one-third of those encounters happened when the birds were foraging—a good indication that whales might be nearby. Such precise data from tagged gulls could help to improve existing technologies, which can only make informed guesses about where whales are at a given moment based on computer models and recent sightings, Shaffer and his colleagues . Better yet, a system that combines the two would be cheap and reliable—and give ship crews enough warning to slow down or change course. All it would require, the researchers posited, is tagging 30 individual gulls with year-round GPS devices. If the idea comes to fruition, Shaffer won’t mind dealing with whatever the sensitive-stomached seabirds cough up.  

Position Title: Game Warden

Ideal Candidate: Eurasian Curlew 

Job Description: Investigate the poaching of a rapidly declining bird species by going undercover. 

Core Competency: Total commitment to conservation. Eurasian Curlews have traditionally been a popular game bird across Western Europe. In the past few decades, however, many countries have enacted hunting bans as the long-beaked waders and the grassland breeding habitat they depend on began to disappear. France implemented a moratorium in 2008, but that decision was controversial—and later partially overturned. “There has been some real social tension over this,” says Frédéric Jiguet, a conservation biologist at the French National Museum of Natural History. Clashes between conservationists and the country’s hunting federation have produced a rollercoaster of regulations, from all-out bans to looser rules that have allowed hunters to kill thousands of Eurasian Curlews. While annual decrees since 2020 have set the hunting quota at zero, concerns about poaching persisted. Since 2019 Jiguet has helped track the birds—some wild, some raised in captivity—to assess threats to their survival and inform future management decisions.

Duties: In the summer of 2022, a year when no curlew hunting was allowed in France, GPS tags provided the scientists with some unexpected data: the precise times and locations that tagged birds were poached. On July 31 a juvenile curlew arrived in the Bay of Canches in northern France after a two-day migration from Germany. A week later, at 5:13 a.m., the bird flew to a nearby pond beside a hunting blind. By 5:33 the tag had stopped moving and was inside the blind. Over the course of the morning, the GPS tag left behind a grim trail of breadcrumbs—through a parking lot, down a series of rural roads, and, finally, to a private residence. The researchers also detected the poaching of three other Eurasian Curlews and immediately reported the cases to the police, who, thanks to the birds themselves, had the street addresses of three of the four suspects. All three claimed they had found the birds already dead and were trying to help scientists by returning the tags. But the sensors, which were constantly gathering data like location, altitude, and velocity, provided plenty of evidence to the contrary. So far, one hunter has been convicted of shooting an unauthorized species and received a fine and a six-month suspension of his hunting permit. Jiguet and the team in 2023 about their experience, hoping it would encourage fellow scientists to use bird-tracking technology to help enforce conservation laws and to send a message to would-be poachers. “The following year, no tagged birds were shot,” says the scientist, “so maybe the message was received.”

Position Title: Marine Mapping Technician

Ideal Candidate: Cormorant

Job Description: Chart the underwater terrain, currents, and other properties of the coastal ocean, providing intel that can be used to better forecast severe storms and manage shipping channels. 

Core Competency: Free-diving expertise. As rising seas and stronger storms threaten the more than one-third of humanity that lives along the world’s shores, scientists are rushing to understand the coastal ocean environment, a complex ecosystem where wind, water, and land are in constant flux. Traditional survey methods require instrument­-packed ships and lots of funding. Strapping a sensor on a diving seabird, on the other hand, gets the job done at a fraction of the cost. With absorbent feathers and webbed feet, cormorants are among the ­deepest-diving birds in the world, a distinction that makes them especially valuable to oceanographers like Oregon State University’s Jim Lerczak. “If you put one tag on a bird, you’re going to make a lot of measurements through different seasons in the same location.”

Duties: Launched in 2013 and funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the  has tagged 14 species of cormorants and shags in 17 countries in an ­effort to chart the coastal ocean. The birds wear solar-powered devices that measure water temperature, salinity, and pressure during the approximately 100 dives they make each day. For some species, more than half of those descents take a bird all the way to the ocean floor, providing detailed depth readings that are valuable for shipping navigation. And when the birds surface, GPS readings and accelerometer data collected between dives provide ­information about the speed and direction of the current. “It’s amazing how much data they have collected for us,” says Lerczak, one of the project’s leaders. “Combining real measurements from birds and model data ­collected by computers is really powerful.” The bird-borne instruments have helped correct errors in temperature models of cold ocean upwellings, a significant source of uncertainty in West Coast circulation models—tools that help scientists predict consequential climatic events. 

Position Title: Waste Management Associate

Ideal Candidate: Yellow-legged Gull 

Job Description:  Help officials identify and clean up litter hotspots in a city of 1.7 million residents. 

Core Competency: Thrives in urban environments. Every spring in Barcelona, Yellow-legged Gulls make themselves at home on buildings and public infrastructure, creating nests with whatever scraps the hardy and resourceful birds can find. Concerned that the structures might endanger public health or safety, the city dispatches workers to remove them. Most of the time, crews toss out the nests like any other rubbish. But in 2021 Eve Galimany, a postdoctoral researcher at the ­Institute of Marine Science who studies marine litter, asked workers to bring them to her lab ­instead. ­Galimany and her colleagues attached GPS trackers to nine breeding Yellow-legged Gulls across the coastal city to compare where they traveled and how that related to the trash in their nests. 

Duties: All 30 of the nests that Galimany dissected contained trash that accounted for more than one-fifth of their total weight. Plastic was by far the most common category of litter, appearing in every one she examined, followed by a motley catalog of other refuse, including paper, metal, and hygiene products, like wet wipes and single-use gloves. And then there were the socks and underwear the marauders had apparently stolen from unsuspecting residents’ clotheslines. “They seem to be very attracted by the plastic clips that you use to hang the clothes,” Galimany says. “They love those.” When Galimany’s team reviewed the tracking data, they found that Yellow-legged Gulls didn’t have to leave the city—or even try too hard—to forage for nesting materials. “They don’t get in dumpsters or in trash bins,” Galimany says—they just pick it up from messy streets. The may have underscored the seriousness of the city’s litter problem, but they also point to the seabirds as sentinels that can help to solve it: By monitoring gull nests over time, officials in Barcelona and cities around the world can identify and clean up trash hotspots, making urban environments safer for people and wildlife alike.

This story originally ran in the Spring 2025 issue as “Help Wanted.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by .