Landing an international bird-tracking program in northern Arizona

Brisa Karow | Published by The Lumberjack

Jan. 28, 2025

Kay Hawklee’s Jeep Wrangler rumbled along a dirt road southeast of Flagstaff, kicking up dust in its wake. It was a Thursday in November, late afternoon, and the shadows of the trees lining the road stretched longer as the minutes passed. 

It may have been any random afternoon for Hawklee, an avid bird enthusiast who spent much of her time seeking out different species in northern Arizona. However, excitement was growing as she drove further down the road, closer to a goal that had been building for a year.

Inside the Jeep was a small device called a NanoTag — thin as wire, with the technology to track location data.  

It was sending radio-transmitted pings to a tower more than a mile up the hill, monitoring the Jeep’s progress in almost real-time. The receiver station — situated next to the Lowell Observatory Perkins Telescope on land owned by the Forest Service — had been installed earlier that day. 

However, the tag was not intended to follow the location of a vehicle, a person or even on-the-ground movements.

The local birder was testing the NanoTag’s reach so the radio tower could later pick up a bird — wearing a similar tag — flying by. 

The receiver station and tag were components that made up the Motus Wildlife Tracking System, an international data collection program that monitors flight patterns of individual birds, bats and large insects with more than 2,000 stations around the world. The project relies on a network of scientists, conservationists, educators and citizens who lead tagging projects and station installations to compile data on migratory animals and endangered species. 

As animals travel between Motus receiver stations, their tags ping off the radio towers, providing a markup of their general flight path and how they used the habitats they stopped through.

Hawklee had been working since November 2023 to bring the program to northern Arizona by installing receiver stations in the region. She hopes data from the Motus stations will, in turn, help the Arizona legislature make land management decisions about habitat and water conservation in a drying climate.

One species Hawklee said she hopes NAAS will see detected by their stations is the Southwestern Willow Flycatcher, a federally endangered bird threatened by a loss of riparian habitats — areas along the banks of a river, stream or other bodies of water.

With more than a decade of birding experience behind her, Hawklee still considers herself relatively new to the hobby and certainly not an expert. Yet, her ability to recognize a bird out of the sky or hidden on the side of the road is telling of her knowledge of the aerial animal.

She began birding at 59 years old in 2015 after reading “The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession” by Mark Obmascik, an aspiring read for many in the birding community. Six years later, Hawklee struck out on her own “Big Year,” seeing 658 bird species in the American Birding Association geographical region of North America, north of Mexico. 

As Hawklee learned more about birds and their habitats, she leaned into conservation and advocated for the resources the animals required to survive. 

“Along with knowing about individual species inevitably comes the knowledge that birds are disappearing from the planet in alarming numbers at an alarming rate,” she said.

Over the past four years, Hawklee served as president of the Northern Arizona Audubon Society (NAAS), working on educating people about habitat conservation and providing opportunities for them to connect with birds in the region. 

During her second term, the National Audubon Society developed and released its “Flight Plan,” and Hawklee shifted her momentum toward a more technical solution for bird conservation. 

The Audubon Society’s strategy outlines plans in habitat conservation, climate action, policy change and community building to lessen the decline of North American bird populations, which have sunk by more than three billion since 1970. By 2028, Audubon plans to make a significant impact in halting the decline of birds across the Americas. 

Hawklee heard of the aggressive plan and saw that it provided concrete goals for her and the northern Arizona chapter to work toward. 

She remembered a talk on Motus she had attended nearly seven years ago. The project fell in line with — and was a driver of change for — the hemispheric conservation goals of the “Flight Plan.” At the 2023 National Audubon Leadership Conference, Hawklee pledged to install two Motus stations in northern Arizona by the end of her NAAS presidency.

As she pulled her Jeep to a stop at a bend in the angled dirt Forest Service Road, stepped out holding the NanoTag and glanced up the hill at the tower far out of sight, she spoke over the phone to a group tracking the tower’s data.

“We’re supposed to stay in one place for about two minutes,” she said into the phone.

Binoculars dangling from her neck and a broad smile on her face, Hawklee waited for a response, not expecting the group to pick her location up so far down in elevation from the tower.

“We just saw something,” said Rick Moore, a NAAS board member who helped construct the tower. “It picked it up.”

“You got it?” exclaimed Hawklee. “Wow!”

With the tests complete, the Anderson Mesa IBA Motus tower was up and running, ready to detect tagged birds flying by an ecosystem of reservoirs, wetlands and lakes — a common stopping ground for migratory birds passing through — that includes Upper and Lower Lake Mary and the Marshall, Mormon, Ashurst and Kinnikinick lakes. 

Hawklee had checked off the first part of her goal: installing the first Motus tower in northern Arizona. 

“This feels like one of the things that I can do that I don't need a Ph.D. for,” Hawklee said. “I can raise money. I can get Motus stations built, and then, that's enabling the science world not to have to go do that step.”

Tracking species’ movements is becoming increasingly more important for scientists as they examine shifts in birds’ migration patterns due to a warming climate. According to a 2019 Audubon report, if the global temperature rises by 3 degrees Celsius — a catastrophic scenario of climate change projected by scientists  —  two-thirds of North American bird species are at risk of extinction. 

Hawklee has already begun to see evidence of those migratory shifts.

In her backyard in Oak Creek Canyon between Flagstaff and Sedona, Hawklee identified a pair of Northern Cardinals, which typically do not travel into the northern part of Arizona. Now, there are two breeding pairs near her house; an anomaly for the species, yet a trend that likely will become more common as birds adjust their range northward due to climate change. 

“If people pay attention, the birds will tell you what’s happening,” she said.

A month later, and nearly 70 miles south of Anderson Mesa, the second NAAS Motus tower installation was underway at a private ranch in Camp Verde on the banks of one of the last free-flowing rivers in Arizona. 

Rancho Tres Brisas, a 100-acre family-run cattle ranch, borders the Verde River for a quarter mile. It has been managed by Jeni and Mike O’Callaghan since Jeni’s family purchased it in 1963. The two are advocates of the Verde River and work with local environmental organizations to better use their property and business for water conservation efforts.

Jeni’s uncle built a tower on the property over 50 years ago, welding it together by hand. Standing about 40 feet tall, it became host to the second northernmost Arizona Motus tower in early December. The station was called Rancho Tres Brisas Verde River.

At the station’s installation, a group gathered around the tower’s control box. 

Leading them was Kelly Cullen from Niles Radio Communications, a local radio and satellite company based out of Flagstaff that joined NAAS’ Motus project in the fall. 

Moore had called the company up, asking for advice on installing the Anderson Mesa tower, and Cullen was the one to answer. 

Cullen took over Niles Radio from his father, Jim, a well-known figure in the Flagstaff community and the namesake of the Jim Cullen Memorial Park in town. 

Niles Radio typically only contracts multimillion-dollar projects, with some of Cullen’s sites located on Mount Elden in Flagstaff, Sunshine Hill in Jerome, Squaw Peak in Camp Verde and Chevelon Butte in Winslow. So, this project was out of the ordinary for him.

But it presented new challenges to the seasoned radio engineer, who has a lifetime of manual labor etched into his calloused hands. The project excited Cullen, and it was like nothing he had worked on before, so he agreed and joined on. 

To prepare for his first Motus tower installation at Anderson Mesa, Cullen spent hours reading the project’s manual on his weekends to understand its inner workings.

“It’s a [smaller] tower than what we’re generally on, but the equipment is totally different, and this is stuff I’ve never seen,” Cullen said. “I had to actually read the manual and work my way through it.”

The Rancho Tres Brisas tower, set upon a rocky hill overlooking the cattle and horses roaming below, required a different approach to the smaller and more simple Anderson Mesa tower.

Niles Radio’s trucks accessed the tower via steep paths sewn into the land — a rugged desert landscape of ravines, outcrops and washes scattered with cottonwoods and shrubbery providing shade for the ranch’s livestock.   

The established tower had the bare bones feeling of temporary scaffolding; built with no zoning laws and after half a century of wear and tear, it was not a structure one would want to hang out on for long. Jeni O’Callaghan put the thought of climbing the tower out of her head long ago. 

“On some ranch somewhere, this is the only place this could exist,” Cullen said. “I mean, this tower is in rough shape.” 

To get the Motus station up and running, antennas needed to be placed and attached high up on the tower and wired down to a control box at the base. Cullen, strapped into his climbing gear, scaled the tower’s ladder, his worn work boots taking each step with care.

Halfway up the tower, he paused to wrap electrical tape around an antenna’s wiring, painted against the backdrop the sky provided, almost hovering mid-air. 

On his return to the ground, Cullen stood fixed at the base of the tower with his laptop connected by an ethernet cable to the control box, focused on the antenna’s readings. A group of Audubon Society birders hovered over his shoulders to catch a glimpse of the test tags on his screen. 

“This is the first really, really technical piece that we have done for real conservation work in terms of helping researchers and biologists,” Hawklee said. 

Any number of research projects can use the data collected from the northern Arizona Motus stations, which filled a gap in the region that had been a blackout for the tracking system. With both receiver stations active, the Audubon Society’s project turns into a waiting game as they stand by for the first tagged bird to fly by, putting their work to use.