EVER wondered what birds of prey are getting up to when they fly off over the horizon? Wonder no more, thanks to , a website that generates blog posts on behalf of four red kites in Scotland.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) is keen to give the public information about the behaviour of red kites, which nearly went extinct in the UK before being reintroduced from 1989.
at the University of Aberdeen and his colleagues developed a system in collaboration with the RSPB that mines data from sensors attached to the birds and generates natural-language blog posts to accompany interactive flight maps.
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To spice up the posts, the system mixes in information about red kites鈥� typical behaviour. For example, in a week in which one of the birds, called Millie, flew a long way for a kite, the blog begins: 鈥淭his week, Millie flew around an astonishing 261 miles.鈥� And if a bird visits an area known to be grassland, say, the system can speculate that it may be feeding on rabbits or pheasant.
Any animal tagged with location sensors can feature in such a system, the team claims. They presented the work at a meeting of the in Sofia, Bulgaria, last month.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淗ear all about the flights of the rare red kites鈥�
