The recording of this program from 3 December 2024 is now available online

The Motus Wildlife Tracking System: Using technology to research grassland birds, with Senior Avian Ecologist Matt Webb.

The Motus Wildlife Tracking System is a complex and sophisticated system designed to track migrations of birds and other wildlife, and currently has over 1,500 stations worldwide.  The Motus (Latin for movement or motion) system uses a variety of transmitters – some as light as .05 grams – which are attached to a variety of migrating wildlife.  Information from the receiver stations is fed into large databases which are at the core of a great deal of research on migrations. In this overview and to illustrate how the system actually works, Matt Webb will describe how the Motus system is being used for research on five different species of grassland birds at the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies.

Matt Webb is the Senior Avian Ecologist and Motus Wildlife Tracking System Coordinator at the Bird Conservatory of the Rockies in Fort Collins, CO.  He was born and raised in Salida, CO. Around age 10, at odds with his preferences, his family moved to the ‘dull’ plains of Northern Colorado. To Matt’s surprise, he fell in love with the endless roll and incredible diversity of the shortgrass prairies. He later spent some time in Pittsburgh, PA, working at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the American Bird Conservancy, and the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Wildlife Biology and a Master’s in Conservation Leadership, both received from Colorado State University. When not building automated radio telemetry stations, Matt enjoys mothing, photographing beetles, riding and fixing bicycles, turning over stones, and dragging his family outside at night to watch the International Space Station go by.

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