The New Jersey Audubon is one of the oldest environmental groups in New Jersey, but it is relying on some state-of-the-art technology to count migrating birds.
Founded in 1897 in New Jersey, the NJ Audubon is now forgoing pen and paper in favor of using an application called Trektellen to collect and store data about migrating birds. The app was created in the Netherlands by Gerard Troost, who works for an organization called Sovon, which is essentially the Dutch version of Audubon.
According to Tom Reed, the Migration Count Coordinator with NJ Audubon at the Cape May Bird Observatory, Trektellen was largely Troost’s side project, but it became the leading way for entities and individuals to collect and store data for long-term, migration monitoring projects. There are presently over 3,300 sites around the world that have been active on Trektellen.
Lillian Armstrong of NJ Audubon said Trektellen is used at all migration sites in New Jersey, including the biggest and most well known, which is the Cape May Hawk Watch site located at Cape May Point State Park. Armstrong said the second largest migration observation site is the Avalon Sea Watch.
“It is really underappreciated,” she said.
These two sites, along with the Morning Flight Song Bird Count are kicked off in the fall, when over a million birds fly along the Delaware Bay and Atlantic Ocean coastlines funneling toward Cape May Point on their way to their winter habitat. Along the way, the Trektellen app is used on a Samsung tablet rather than the old way of writing data on paper forms. The hand-written data was often victim to poor handwriting, smudges, the weather, and other issues.
NJ Audubon first piloted Trektellen in spring 2016 at its Springwatch site, which according to Armstrong, Reed started on his own.
“At the time, we were the first and only site in the Americas to be utilizing electronic data entry for such a project,” Reed told the Herald. “We were pleased with how it worked and then adopted it at all migration count sites in fall 2016.”
Reed said there are now close to 100 sites in the Americas using the Trektellen app.
Reed said he served a term on the Hawk Migration Association board of directors, mostly to advance the use of electronic data entry at hawkwatch sites in North America. He said, in addition to working on Android/Samsung devices, there is an Apple version that is under development now.
“The main takeaway is that we are able to enter data more accurately, we are able to collect more information about individual birds/flocks, we are better connected to other folks around the world,” Reed said.
Contact Christopher South at csouth@cmcherald.com
