ABOVE: Razorbill (Alca torda)
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In 2011, an undergraduate/masters student at Bangor University in the UK brought physical oceanographer David Bowers an annotated map of the Irish Sea. The map showed the trajectories of colonial seabirds called razorbills (Alca torda) that had been fitted with GPS trackers. The student was interested in why the razorbills had gone to particular regions to feed. But Bowers noticed something else in the data.
“At nighttime, the birds were moving in a way that wasn’t flying; they were going too slow,” Bowers, now retired, recalls. “And crucially, they changed their direction when the tide turned from going one way to the other. . . . Straightaway I realized they were going with the flow.”
The insight lay dormant until four years later, when Bowers suggested that a Bangor student named Matt Cooper, who was interested in the use of tides as a source ...
