Phillip emailed me this article on researcher Beatriz da Costa and her pollution-blogging pigeons. Custom backpacks equipped with cellphone technology, GPS, and pollutant sensors will be placed on the birds before their flight on August 5th. The sensor data will be reported back to a pollution blog and displayed on an interactive map.
Although it poses some questions on ethics and avian ergonomics, I think this is the right direction to go. People take in media so, well, why not give the medium to our animal friends so that they can let us know what’s up with the world. We already have cancer-detecting dogs, why not racoon police to detect recyclables in garbage bins. Equipped with cameras and sophisticated imaging technologies they could find the glass bottles, paper and cans and then search further for identifying articles such as addresses on envelopes and photographs. Maybe that’s stretching it, but you get the general idea.
I was going to highlight this post with a picture but instead, I encourage you to go outside and find your own pigeon imagery. I am trying to convince Phillip to join me in a photoshoot by the health sciences buildings as he wanted to find something that would capture “pigeons blogging”. All we would need is a keyboard and some bread crumbs…