Science and technology play an integral part these days in allowing us to learn more about our native wildlife and in the fight against wildlife crime. The satellite transmitter fitted to ‘our Betty’ as a young chick, is a fantastic example of this. In the first instance we learnt a huge amount about how mobile harriers can be but it also allowed us to recover her body and discover the cause of her death.
A number of monitoring methods are currently being used by scientists and conservationists to learn about the dispersal and survival of hen harriers including radio transmitters, wing tags and leg rings. There are pros and cons for all these methods but what they all have in common is they require the external ‘marking’ of the birds and therefore varying amounts of physical intervention.
DNA tags are potentially a way of monitoring harriers without any physical intervention and could prove an important forensic tool in cases of illegal persecution.
Scientists at the University of Central Lancashire have been working on a method of sexing hen harriers using DNA samples. The recently published research by Henderson et al. has established a way in which the sex of a hen harrier can be identified from a sample of DNA even if it is of poor quality or only available in small amounts, as would often be the case if the body was in a heavily decomposed state.
If you’re interested you can find a link to the abstract here.
The teams' research isn't ending there however. The ability to sex a bird from its DNA is an integral first step in developing the capability to identify individual birds. The team at UCLAN are now working on this next objective which will hopefully prove a useful tool to both conservationists and those investigating wildlife crimes.