For Lighthawk volunteer pilot Dan Silvers, a recent mission gave him the chance to fly low and slow, while at the same time helping ensure the survival of an endangered species.
Lighthawk is a non-profit organization that has a network of 300 volunteer general aviation pilots who donate their time and airplanes to fly researchers, policy makers, elected officials, and others on conservation and environmental missions.
For Silvers’ latest mission, he flew researchers from the University of Maine to track the golden-winged warbler.
The golden-winged warbler is a small bird currently experiencing a substantial decline in population. It has reached the point where it is being considered for listing on the Endangered Species Act.
In 2021, scientists at the university placed 35 VHF-coded nanotags on both male and female birds near Rhineland, Wisconsin.
A year later, Silvers flew scientists and their radio telemetry gear over the same area in an attempt to relocate as many of the tagged birds as possible. This required mounting a VHF receiver antenna to the strut of his Cessna 182 ahead of the flight.
The tags turn on each day, starting at 10 p.m. and turn off again at 8:30 a.m. They transmit a signal every 30 seconds and have a range of 5 kilometers. This means it’s important for the flight to be conducted at a slower speed to ensure the greatest chance of receiving a signal, according to Lighthawk officials.
“This flight was incredibly useful to us,” said Emily Filiberti, a graduate student researcher at the University of Maine. “One of our objectives was to understand if females are dispersing to other locations in subsequent breeding seasons. We already had a sense that males rarely disperse off of their original territories and wanted to be able to confirm the same for females.”
“Since we deployed 20 VHF-coded nanotags on females last year, we were able to detect them this year to see if they remained on the same sites as original capture,” she continued. “However, we needed to be able to search an extended radius around our study sites to confirm that females hadn’t dispersed and were breeding in different locations. Searching this entire radius would have been close to impossible on the ground given our resources and availability. By utilizing LightHawk and our volunteer pilot, we were able to conduct aerial telemetry that allowed us to search for tags miles away from their original breeding territories.”
The researchers also learned that the nanotags, which are quite small, are able to be detected from above. This information will be shared with other researchers studying the warblers, they noted.
This illustrates the value GA aircraft bring to conservation research. A small plane allowed researchers to fly slow enough and at an altitude that allowed them to receive the VHS signals from small electronic tags that can be attached to small birds, Lighthawk officials explained.
Learn more about Lighthawk, including how to become a volunteer pilot, at Lighthawk.org.