The Vieques, Puerto Rico Motus Station is Up!

By Daphne Gemmill

The installation of a Vieques Motus station to track birds is a reality. The Motus Wildlife Tracking System is a collaborative research network that uses automated radio telemetry to track wildlife.  Our station is the third to be installed in Puerto Rico and the fifteenth in the Caribbean. It is a joint project of the Vieques Conservation and Historical Trust and the National Wildlife Refuge System[MW1] , with support from American Bird Conservancy and BirdsCaribbean.

It took two years from reading a Motus article to going operational. In January 2022, Dale Doucette, a member of the Vieques Conservation and Historical Trust (VCHT) Bird Committee, read an article about Motus and contacted Maya Wilson, manager of the Caribbean Motus Collaboration, a bird monitoring initiative facilitated by Birds Caribbean to expand the Motus network in the Caribbean. A tower on Vieques Island, Puerto Rico, where the Greater and Lesser Antilles meet, is an ideal location for several stations. By fall of that year, Daphne Gemmill, another committee member, and three local birders, Erick Bermúdez, Omar Peréz Rivera, and Cesar Montero, undertook a bird-a-thon to raise money to bring a station to the island.

 At 4:45 am, Daphne was up along with the first bird of the bird-a-thon, a Zenaida Dove, but the sun was not. She met her team and they were off until 5 pm. They set the Big Day record for island with 67 species raising over $7,000, which qualified for a match.  More than enough funds to bring a Motus station for tracking wildlife, especially shorebirds, to Vieques.

Zenaida Dove by Daphne Gemmill

Highlights of the day were three extremely rare birds for the island--American Wigeon, American Flamingo, and Yellow-throated Vireo.

American Flamingo by By Erick Bermúdez

Yellow-throated Vireo By Daphne Gemmill

Two other extremely rare birds, Hudsonian Godwit and Ruff, failed to put in an appearance on the Big Day but the day before and the day after. Bad timing. The last birds of the day were Pied-billed and Least Grebes.

Least Grebe, By Erick Bermúdez

With money in hand by 2023, the team began the process to identify the best location that would give the most coverage of prime bird habitat. Luckily, much of the equipment for a station was already available through the NWR System, which is expanding Motus to Caribbean refuges[MW1] . And it turned out that the Vieques NWR headquarters building was a great spot for a Motus station. Once the site was selected, BirdsCaribbean and American Bird Conservancy worked with refuge staff to design the station, and began the process of getting everything to Vieques. Although the equipment arrived in San Juan in Fall 2023, it did not arrive in Vieques until February due to shipping complications.

The last hurdles were encountered during the installation phase, when wires prevented the backhoe from reaching the designated spot. When the site was moved approximately 30 feet, a water pipe was in the way – oops! Luckily, we were able to resolve these issues, and Alberic Medina Ramírez (VCHT) and his team poured the concrete to secure the tower base, then installed the rest of the Rohn tower.  A lot of sweat by Pedro Ayala Cruz (VCHT) went into drilling a hole through cider block and cement in the exterior wall, designed to withstand Class 5 hurricanes, to bring the coaxial cables into the building. With the robust tower secured to the refuge building, Adam Smith (American Bird Conservancy) and Maya installed the six antennas (three for each of the two radio frequencies used by Motus), then connected them with coaxial cable to the station receiver inside the building.

Adam Smith and Maya Wilson assembling antenna, by Daphne Gemmill

As of March 23, 2024 the station is operational. The antennas are listening over several important bird areas including Cerro Playuela, and Laguna Playa Grande and Laguna Sombe or Salitral. The lagoon sites are vital for shorebirds. The Playuela trail has a mixture of habitats from dry limestone forest to mangrove lagoon to beach, attracting an excellent variety of landbirds, especially migratory ones. Last fall the first record of Swainson’s Thrush was recorded along this trail. The two mangrove lagoons are known stop-over spots for shorebirds with up to 20,000 passing through in a year. The most common of the shorebirds are Semipalmated, Stilt, and Least Sandpipers; and  Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs, One or more of these shorebirds surely will have a Motus radio tag.

Laguna Sombe/Salitral on left and Puerto Mosquito on right, by Daphne Gemmill

We anxiously await our first tagged bird.  Will it be one of the many shorebirds that visit the lagoons, like a Semipalmated Sandpiper, Least Sandpiper? Or a passerine, such as a Blackpoll Warbler or American Redstart?

We are contemplating next steps, including developing a research proposal to deploy Motus tags on priority species, and raising the funds to carry it out. For example, nothing is known about Wilson’s Plovers annual movements, which is important knowledge for conservation plans. Vieques hosts 1% to 8% of the Caribbean subpopulation of this species, making it an ideal place to undertake this research.

Wilson Plover by Daphne Gemmill

To explore data and learn more about how technology is changing how we learn about birds go to https://motus.org/.