A Thermographic Health Check

Published: 16 January 2015

An increasing number of birds now fly around with fancy equipment ties to them recording all sorts of information. But what effect has this payload into the animal carrying it. Thermal imaging could be one way to find out.

Increasingly, birds are equipped with all sorts of fancy equipment that is strapped to the bird and gives us novel insights where the birds go and what they do while we can't observe them. That generates really interesting novel information that helps to better understand the biology of many species that were difficult to study before. Relatively little, however, is know how they may be affected by this equipment. The main concern is the body weight, and the astonishing advances in miniaturising this gadget means that the animals now carry only a very low percentage of extra weight with them, typically less than 3%. In birds for short-term deployment loggers can be simply taped to feathers. But increasingly we want to deploy our equipment for longer and if attached to feathers they would come off in the moult. Thus loggers need to be attached differently, for example using harnesses. Thermal imaging also gives us an opportunity to test the impact of these devices on the bird. Maureen Ellis and Nina O'Hanlon were looking at the effect of loggers and harness on herring gulls. As described in an earlier entry (stress is cool) body surface temperature is a good candidate to assess whether an individual is stressed. Preliminary results suggest that there was no evidence that surface temperature (measured around the eye of the gull) was different in birds carrying our equipment and control birds. It was also encouraging to see that there was no signs of the harness disturbing the insulative plumage layer and therefore did not cause increased heat loss.

 

These are just a few examples of the opportunities that thermal images may offer to our study to better understand how animals are able to deal with environmental challenges.

 


First published: 16 January 2015