The mother bird doesn't seem to mind the plastic cylinder lodged in her nest. It's only the size of a cigarette lighter, and even though it's loaded with high tech electronics, it doesn't beep, buzz, blink, or otherwise worry the ravenous hatchlings in the nest... In fact, none of the hundred-plus wireless sensors located on Great Duck Island bother the birds. And that's the whole point. They've been placed here by researchers to remotely study why Great Duck, a coastal Maine island, is the chosen breeding ground for a species of waterfowl called Leach's Storm Petrel. With no shortage of nearby islands to choose from, it's unclear why these finicky petrels insist on returning to Great Duck year after year to construct their nesting burrows. The reigning theory is that the island's climate is particularly suited to the birds' procreative predilections. To test this theory, researchers are using a low power wireless sensor network called "smart dust" to monitor the environment and behavior of the birds. Developed at the UCLA Berkeley College of Engineering, smart dust particles are small wireless devices designed to monitor any number of environmental conditions, such as temperature, humidity, motion, light levels, or pollution. As part of a joint effort between Intel's Research Lab at Berkeley, the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, and the University of California at Berkeley, the network was deployed last summer on Great Duck to help biologists learn four things about the petrels: nesting burrow usage patterns, environmental changes in the burrows and across the island during breeding season, the ideal microclimate for breeding, nesting, and hatching, and what the microclimate differences are between highly and sparsely populated areas of the island. Full article here.