An eagle from Khakassia has devastated ornithologists who track the routes of birds of prey. She flew to Iran and sends hundreds of SMS with her coordinates

A steppe eagle named Min, born in Khakassia, has ruined Russian ornithologists who track the eagles' routes using SMS transmitters. Ming has flown to Iran and is sending hundreds of costly text messages from there with her own coordinates. about this in a telegram told Elena Schneider, a Novosibirsk ornithologist, to her record ; the publication of the NGS drew attention .

Volunteers from Novosibirsk are helping the Russian Raptor Research and Conservation Network tag eagles and falcons with transmitters. Such devices send daily SMS messages to researchers with the coordinates of birds. This is necessary in order to study the main migration routes of eagles and falcons and identify threats along their path.

The technology works like this: the transmitter receives coordinates from satellites at a given frequency, writes them to internal memory and sends SMS as soon as the bird is in the network coverage area. Marked eagles and falcons fly with regular SIM cards from one of the Russian operators. Ornithologists roughly know in which countries they winter and through which they fly, so they can calculate the budget for the season.

Typically, SMS costs from 2 to 15 rubles, depending on the country of residence of the bird. But this year, the Ming eagle did not fit into the budget for 13 tagged eagles. She spent the summer in Kazakhstan outside the access zone and, contrary to the expectations of ornithologists, did not get in touch there or in Russia, but immediately flew to Iran - and began to send hundreds of SMS to ornithologists with her coordinates at 49 rubles per message.

Since Ming has exhausted the total eagle budget for SMS alerts, ornithologists have announced the “Put the eagle on a mobile phone!” campaign, which will last until the end of 2019. Members can put money into a shared eagle number and help the birds stay connected. You can find out the details of the action here , and see the routes of movement of Ming and other eagles here (for example, Aina the eagle is now in Sudan!).

Olga Korelina

Announcement photo: Ondrej Prosicky / Shutterstock.com