FLORENCE, MONTANA
William Blake retrieves data from a Motus station along the Bitterroot River. The system detects and records tagged birds, including Lewis’s Woodpeckers, that pass by.
THE LEWIS’S WOODPECKER is one of the West’s avian gems. It has a ruby-red face and emerald feathers draped across its back like a cape with a silver cowl. In summer it swoops and circles over woodlands west of the Great Plains, performing aerial acrobatics as it hunts insects on the wing. While wintering in forests of the far West and Southwest, it aggressively defends caches of stored nuts from piratical Acorn Woodpeckers. Captivating as it is, however, there is still much we don’t know about the bird’s movements and biology—or what has driven its population to decline by about half since the 1960s.
To figure out what’s spurring the losses, scientists at MPG Ranch, a conservation research group in western Montana, are tracking Lewis’s Woodpeckers with a simple and increasingly popular technology. Since 2019 they’ve attached radio transmitters to birds breeding in the Bitterroot Valley. When a tagged bird passes within a dozen miles of one of 13 receiver stations in the 96-mile-long valley, its identity is automatically logged at the antenna location, revealing its movements on its breeding grounds. Individuals tagged in the Bitterroot
