Title:
Scientists Use Radar to Study Bats, Birds and
Insects
Description: This is
a VOA Special English General News Report.
See text below
Text:
Tom Kunz puts electronic devices on bats and birds
to follow their movement. Recently, the Boston
University biologist started using information
gathered by radar.
TOM KUNZ: "The technology has improved to the extent
that we can now see things that we couldn't see
before."
Weather experts commonly ignore radar images of
birds and bats when they predict weather conditions.
But Kunz says biologists can learn a lot from radar
station readings.
TOM KUNZ: "From an integrated and networked dataset,
we can actually determine where and when bats and
birds are moving across the landscape."
Kunz spoke at a meeting of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science. Another speaker was
Winifred Frick, who has studied bats. Both she and
Kunz raised the same question.
WINIFRED FRICK: "Do you think we could estimate the
number of bats in a bat cloud? Oh, sure! So that
actually initiated this collaboration."
Their work led to a method for counting masses of
bats in the wild. Frick says knowing this
information could help with studies of animal
behavior and the seasonal movement of birds and
other creatures.
WINIFRED FRICK: "We can look at the number of
different sites all at once. That will give us a
really good picture about the health of these
populations. And this particular species, Brazilian
free-tailed bats, does an enormous job for
agriculture in terms of eating agricultural crop
pests."
New radar information is available to researchers
every five minutes. They also can study twenty years
of older information. Frick says this information
can be found on the Internet.
WINIFRED FRICK: "See this whole front of bats kind
of emerging here."
Frick says the use of radar to study bats, birds and
insects shows great promise. She hopes that, one
day, weather reports will provide information not
just about clouds, but also the clouds of bats
flying from one place to another. I'm Shirley
Griffith.
Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
To post a comment:
• Click "Comment using..." in
the window below
• Click your favorite service: Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail
• Login to the service
• Click "Add a comment..."
• Post your comment in the window
Students: Please post a
comment stating what you found interesting about this video. You are
welcome to include links to your English study blogs and any
other materials you think might be useful for learning
English.
Teachers: Please post your
thoughts about this video. You are welcome to include links to
your sites, blogs, and any other materials you think might
be useful for learning English.
Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
