A quick guide to video-tracking birds

Video tracking is a powerful new tool for studying natural undisturbed behaviour in a wide range of birds, mammals and reptiles. Using integrated animal-borne video tags, video footage and positional data are recorded simultaneously from wild free-ranging animals. At the analysis stage, video scenes are linked to radio fixes, yielding an animal's eye view of resource use and social interactions along a known movement trajectory. Here, we provide a brief description of our basic equipment and field techniques to enable other researchers to start their own video-tracking studies.