Bio-logging

Understanding social movement decisions means measuring not just where an animal goes, but what it is attending to as it decides. Collective biologging is our approach to capturing many individuals at once with on-body sensors — recording movement, body orientation, and, increasingly, gaze — so that the behaviour of an individual can be read alongside the social context that shaped it. By instrumenting whole groups, from soaring birds to pilots in a gaggle, we reconstruct the flow of information through a moving collective in fine detail.

Projects

Collective Bio-logging

Collective Bio-logging

Bio-logger development

Our work in bio-logger development is driven by a simple idea: if we want to understand behaviour in the wild, we need devices and analytical systems that are built around the biology of the question, not only the engineering of the sensor. We have worked across the full pipeline, from Daily Diary methods and behaviour annotation to logger optimisation, data transmission, and multi-sensor system design. This includes work on how to deploy tags more effectively for movement ecology, how to recover richer behavioural information from onboard sensors, and how to move large quantities of data reliably from free-ranging animals. Together, these projects have helped build the methodological foundation for extracting behaviour, performance and ecology from increasingly complex biologging systems.

Our current work is moving beyond recording individuals in isolation and toward capturing social interactions in motion. This includes development using WildFi and related multi-sensor platforms, e-obs GPS-IMU devices with social interaction firmware, and new approaches for fine-scale proximity detection and localisation. In the condor system, we are extending this into a long-term infrastructure built around IMU-GPS-proximity solar-powered devices, base stations, and multiple transmission pathways to recover social and movement data at scale.

Biophysics of flight

Our work on soaring birds focuses on the physical limits of flight, the aerodynamic challenges birds face when negotiating complex airflows, and the use of onboard sensors to quantify individual flight performance in free-ranging animals. Using high-resolution bio-logging, particularly inertial measurement units, GPS, magnetometers and related movement sensors, we investigate how birds climb, glide, turn and adjust their behaviour under changing atmospheric conditions. This allows us to recover fine-scale measures of performance from flight itself and to link body motion to flight strategy, space-use and proxies of energetic expenditure.

Published studies have examined how vultures vary bank angle when thermalling close to the ground, how social information can support riskier gliding strategies, and how accelerometry and magnetometry can be used to classify and interpret flight behaviour in the wild. Together, these studies help turn free-flight behaviour into something measurable, allowing us to study how biomechanics, behaviour and environment interact at fine scales.

Current work builds on this foundation in large soaring scavengers, especially Andean condors, by combining IMU-derived behaviour, flight performance metrics and space-use analyses across real landscapes. We are expanding from describing flight behaviour to quantifying how individuals perform under different atmospheric and social conditions, and how these patterns scale up across time and space. Looking ahead, this research aims to make free-flight performance measurable at scale and to use it to understand how birds cope with the energetic and physical challenges of moving through dynamic airspace.