Hasta La Gadget!

Jul 29

Motion-powered bird backpacks take flight

A bird sports a fashionable backpack.

(Credit: Michael Shafer)

Back-to-school shopping isn’t just for people. Some birds are getting backpacks, too. Researchers at the Laboratory for Intelligent Machine Systems at Cornell University are developing tiny high-tech backpacks to collect information on bird flight patterns.

Birds aren’t beasts of burden, so one of the biggest challenges around gathering flight data is finding ways to monitor the birds that don’t interrupt their flying mechanisms. That’s where motion-powered devices come in. “You can’t put a 9-volt battery on a bird, so you need a lightweight energy source,” says Cornell doctoral candidate Michael Shafer.

Shafer’s backpacks have been tested on homing pigeons, which can only carry about 12 grams of weight. The teensy-weensy backpacks contain vibrational energy harvesters that gather the energy from the birds’ movements. A piezoelectric device translates that energy into power for the built-in sensors.