Contact: mketchen@octevue.com
AvianActs
https://www.avianacts.com
AvianActs was founded by Dr. Manjul Bhushan of OctEval, Dr. Mark B. Ketchen and Mr. Hemant Sogani (Linkedin profile) in 2021. It is an independent enterprise leveraging the founders' prior expertise to explore and develop non-intrusive approaches for studying the behavior of wildlife, primarily birds.
Deconvolving magnetic mechanisms for avian orientation and navigation may provide insight for development of new microelectronic systems for navigation and other applications. Experiments reported on European Robins at a few MHz suggest magnetic field sensing in that species may be related to quantum effects with long coherence times at ambient temperatures. We have developed a differential bird feeder technique for applying DC and AC magnetic fields to the heads of "volunteer" songbirds to study the impact of such fields on subject orientation.
AvianActs/Experiments/Magnetic Field Sensing
Biologists and ornithologists collect data on bird body weights to track avian health and metabolic rate. Geographic and seasonal variations of body weight in migratory and non-migratory birds are of special interest. Other sources of weight variations in a species may be related to habitat, food availability, sex, age, breeding status, etc. Weight measurements are typically made on captured or captive birds.
We have developed a test structure to non-invasively measure weights of songbirds arriving on a bird feeder equipped with a remotely read out, high-resolution digital scale.
AvianActs/Experiments/Avian Body Weight