ST. LOUIS — What do zoo keepers and meteorologists have in common? It sounds like the start of a bad joke, but it's actually about tracking.
Meteorologists track the weather and Saint Louis Zoo keepers track birds. On top of an old parking garage owned by the zoo, 5 On Your Side met up with the Curator of Birds, Anne Tieber.
At the very top, there's a large silver antenna with prongs facing multiple directions. The antenna is a telemetry tower and it can ping birds with special trackers on them.
"They just put a little transmitter on their back and they re-release them," Tieber said. "As the birds migrate down and come through the areas where these towers are kept they will ping the tower."
Like storms popping up on radar, birds pop up on the tracker. We know how important storms are to track, but why watch birds?
"For the last several years, bird populations have been in really severe decline," Tieber told 5 On Your Side, "scientists are really trying to figure out what are the main threats besides habitat loss that these birds face on these long migration journeys."
Using their findings, researchers have already come up with one solution, turning the Arch lights off.
Birds could also use a little luck with the weather.
"They're kind of like us," Tieber said, "they sort of watch the weather forecast before they take off on that migration journey."
Tieber said what a lot of people don't realize is that birds mostly migrate at night.
"They use the stars and the moon to navigate, so on cloud nights they may not migrate."
The transmitters used for tracking birds also work on bats and large insects. The receiver is a large telemetry tower that is part of the Motus network. The project is global with over 1,200 stations in 31 countries.