Founded in 2015, the Northeast Motus Collaboration is a joint project of the Willistown Conservation Trust, the Ned Smith Center for Nature and Art, and Project Owlnet, with the goal of creating an inland Northeastern U.S. network of nanotag telemetry receiver stations, part of the Motus Wildlife Tracking Network spearheaded by Birds Canada.
Motus (from the Latin word for "movement") employs relatively inexpensive, automated receiver stations to track birds, bats and even large insects fitted with very tiny (<0.2g) radio transmitters - species that are too small to be tracked with conventional telemetry.
More than 1,600 such stations now exist worldwide, from the Canadian Arctic to South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. The Northeast Motus Collaboration has filled the immense geographical gap in inland areas of the mid-Atlantic and New England, installing more than 150 receiver sites from Maryland and Delware to Maine and Michigan. With additional partners, we are now working to complete the network in the interior Southeastern U.S.