Students Will Track Swans With Satellite The Birds’ Migration In Coming Weeks Will Be Posted On A Web Site Each Day
Holding a swan is like cradling a baby or a stuffed animal or a heavy ball of silk.
Just ask 20 elementary and high school students who were at northern Utah’s Bear River Bird Refuge on ednesday, collaring nine tundra swans with satellite transmitters.
The swans’ migration to California in the coming weeks, back to Utah in the spring and north to Alaska next summer will be tracked by satellite. The location of each bird - within 400 feet - will be posted on a Web site each day, and the students will use the data to research migration patterns.
“They’ll be directly involved in the research. It’s not something we got out of a book,” said Dwight Brown, who will use the swans to teach biology to 170 students. “This is the real thing.”
Brown and fifth-grade teacher Allison Riddle received $30,000 in grants for the Shadow a Swan Project. Most of the money - $27,000 - is being used to purchase the satellite collars.
The rest will pay for satellite time, which amounts to $400 per bird per year, said Brandon Thacker, who helps teachers tap technology and got the idea for the project by reading about a similar one back East.
“We were looking for a way to bring math and science into the classroom and still get a taste of real life,” he said.
Of the estimated 100,000 Western tundra swans, 70,000 migrate through Utah each fall and spring, stopping at an area bird refuge and along the Great Salt Lake.
On Wednesday, a handful of students got to pet and hold the swans. They also helped biologists place a numbered aluminum band around each bird’s foot and a 3-inch wide, hard plastic collar with battery, transmitter and antenna around each neck.
“It’s softer than silk,” said Rick Shurtliff, 15, after he held the third large swan brought in off the water by helicopter.
Ron Hodson, a state Division of Wildlife Resources biologist, captured each swan by leaning out of the helicopter and shooting a net over the bird while it swam. One by one, the helicopter brought the swans to a dike at the south end of the refuge, where the students ooohed and ahhhed.
Tom Aldrich, waterfowl program coordinator for DWR, said the project will help wildlife managers as much as students, since not much is known about tundra swans’ migration and the state lacks the money for such research.
Biologists know that the Western tundra swans breed on the Alaska tundra. About 30 percent go southwest to British Columbia and Washington state for the winter. The rest come south over the Northwest Territories, Montana, Utah and then west through Nevada to the Sacramento Valley and the San Joaquin Delta area of California.
But experts are not sure how long the birds stay in Utah or where they stop along the way. “It’s the details of the migration we don’t know,” Aldrich said.
Tundra swans are plentiful today. But just 50 years ago, there were only about 30,000.
Brown said his classes will chart the latitude and longitude of the swans. Then the students, using the Internet as well as biologists and students in other states, will learn about the land and the food sources where the swans stop.
For Riddle, the project offers more than lessons in biology. Some students are using the swans to learn math concepts such as probability, data sampling and randomness, as well as geography and biology, she said.
On the Net: Visit the project Web site at www.uen.org/swan.