GA Pitches In For Coyote Search

When a wild coyote that researchers had tagged with a radio collar mysteriously went missing in Rhode Island recently, scientist Numi Mitchell called on a friend with a Cessna 172 to help track him down. “The radio signals are normally tracked on the ground, from cars, using antennas,” pilot Ross McCurdy, a high-school science teacher, told AVweb last week. “But an airplane offers a far better position for signal reception, especially when ground tracking runs into problems.” The coyote had been tracked from the ground for months, when the researchers lost his signal.

Mitchell and McCurdy prep the 172.

When a wild coyote that researchers had tagged with a radio collar mysteriously went missing in Rhode Island recently, scientist Numi Mitchell called on a friend with a Cessna 172 to help track him down. "The radio signals are normally tracked on the ground, from cars, using antennas," pilot Ross McCurdy, a high-school science teacher, told AVweb last week. "But an airplane offers a far better position for signal reception, especially when ground tracking runs into problems." The coyote had been tracked from the ground for months, when the researchers lost his signal. The antennas were strapped onto the struts of McCurdy's Skyhawk, and he and Mitchell quickly were able to cover the whole area of Aquidneck Island from about 1,000 feet, including places like swamps and forests far from roads, where the signals are hardest to detect by ground searchers. "It was a perfect day for flying, with calm winds, clear skies, and visibility all the way to Boston," McCurdy said.

Lost coyote

"When we had covered the whole island with no results, we were able to quickly fly across the bay and conduct a sweep of the nearby mainland woods [which the coyote could have reached by a bridge]," McCurdy said. "This took just a few minutes in the airplane and would have taken far longer traveling over the ground." In the end, the aerial sweep delivered negative results. Nonetheless, McCurdy said, "tracking the coyotes from the air was a great time, and aviation really fills this role better than any other method." A few days later, the mystery of the missing coyote was solved. "A wildlife camera got a photo of him," McCurdy said. "So it looks like he's OK, but his radio collar is faulty."