Electronics Unit Records --

The Electronics Unit was created in the mid-1960s while the Denver Wildlife Research Center (DWRC), predecessor to the NWRC, was under the leadership of the Department of the Interior and the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). The FWS initiated radio and satellite telemetry projects to aid in the study and protection of endangered species. The Electronics Unit pioneered work in wildlife telemetry and tailor-made collars and other unique transmitting devices for dozens of species, depending on size, life style, habitat, and type of information needed.

The Unit collaborated with other Federal and private research teams to expand telemetry’s capabilities for wildlife research. In 1974, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) authorized the FWS to track polar bears by satellite using the NIMBUS 6/Random Access Measurement System. The Polar Bear project was part of the FWS’s ecology research program to study the possible effects of energy exploration on polar bear denning habits. In 1976, at Point Barrow, Alaska, researchers captured and fitted three polar bears with transmitters. Although two bears lost their transmitters early in the project, one bear was tracked for over a year with a satellite that passed overhead and sent signals to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Researchers monitored the bear's westward progress to her denning location in the west Siberian Sea, a total of more than 1,000 air miles. Unfortunately, the bear traveled into territory belonging to the Soviet Union. Due to Cold War tensions, US scientists were denied permission to enter the territory to recover the transmitter or to examine the animal and her den.

In collaboration with the National Marine Fisheries Service, the Electronics Unit developed a floating satellite transmitter for a study involving a loggerhead sea turtle. By keeping tabs on the turtle’s wanderings, researchers hoped to learn more about the species’ migratory, feeding, and mating habits. In October 1979, researchers attached a tethered floating satellite transmitter to the shell of a 212-lb. turtle named “Dianne” and released her off the coast of Gulfport, Mississippi. Signals from Dianne’s tracking device were again beamed to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The turtle's 1,400-mile movements were intermittently tracked for the next 8 months. But, in June 1980, the satellite indicated the sea turtle’s transmitter was in Galena, Kansas. The mystery of how the transmitter ended up in Kansas was soon solved when its signal led researchers to the home of a man who had discovered it on a beach while visiting Port Arthur, Texas. The man carried the souvenir back to Kansas where it served as a doorstop and child's toy until its signals led researchers to it. Since the tether to the turtle’s transmitting device had been cut, Dianne’s fate was never discovered.

In addition to sea turtles, FWS researchers used transmitters to track Florida manatees with the tethered floating satellite transmitter system. Service researchers also developed tiny ingestible transmitters to study the movements of fish.

Beginning in the late 1960s through the mid-1990s, the Electronics Unit developed equipment for use in the Center’s International Programs work. The Unit developed transmitters for vampire bats in Latin America that enabled biologists to discover that these carriers of rabies lived in colonies in certain caves, apart from other harmless bat species. Electronics experts also designed electroshock fences for rice paddies in Southeast Asia to repel rodents. In Pakistan, specialists attached radio-tracking collars to wild boar to better understand their damaging behavior to wheat and sugarcane crops. The Unit designed and built radio transmitters to track Quelea in Africa, which allowed researchers to increase the effectiveness of their control operations.

In addition to the Quelea, the Electronics Unit developed telemetry equipment to study the behavior of many other types of birds that caused significant crop damage in the US. During the 1970s and 1980s, telemetry aided in behavioral studies on Starlings in Oregon, on Common Grackles in Oklahoma, and on Redwings in North Dakota. By the 1990s, investigators were studying various transmitter attachments for double-crested cormorants in the South. In 1996, the NWRC collaborated with the California Department of Food and Agriculture to radio-track and study the movements of Chinese ring-necked pheasants to determine if the application of rodenticides for vole management presented hazards to the pheasants.

The Electronics Unit continued to develop telemetry equipment to aid DWRC researchers during the 1990s, developing its first surface-mount wildlife transmitter that offered digital programing for its circuitry in 1990. The 1990’s, however, saw immense changes in the telemetry field with the use of GIS and GPS. Although Center researchers continued to utilize telemetry in wildlife studies, it became no longer necessary for the Unit to build transmitters since many were now commercially available. The Electronics Unit subsequently down-sized in the late 1990s and by 2004 ceased to exist.