Migrating Russian eagles run up data roaming charges

Reminds me of a Polish group doing a Stork study which racked up £2,010 in charges when someone found the sim and used it to make voice calls.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;03&#x2F;stork_mobile_theft&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;03&#x2F;stork_mobile_theft&#x2F;</a>

Isn&#x27;t it ridiculous how much can it cost to send an SMS over a cellular network? I would understand if they were sending a video message from Mars but it&#x27;s a really small ASCII text message sent to a neighbor country in the 21-st century. The whole global telephone system needs to be re-designed.

Instead of mobile phones, they should just switch over to IP via Avian Carrier.

It&#x27;s too bad the eagles aren&#x27;t as good at obeying national borders as spanish vultures are...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bigthink.com&#x2F;strange-maps&#x2F;why-do-vultures-care-about-the-spanish-portuguese-border" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bigthink.com&#x2F;strange-maps&#x2F;why-do-vultures-care-about...</a>

Roaming prices are the equivalent of scamming tourists, I don’t think there’s any body that can prevent it internally unfortunately, it’s just somehow acceptable for companies to shake down travelers for stupid amounts of money.

This is where the ham radio APRS protocol would come in handy.<p>It was designed for position reporting. If course not everywhere would have an APRS receiver, but I&#x27;m sure the tracker could cache data until it finds a receiving station.

I wonder if a virtual country code could be made for scientific inquests like this which are immune from termination and transit fees in use cases like this. Would be good for science.

In South Africa the traffic lights had some cards in them at one point and the same things happened. Traffic lights smashed so the cards could be used.

Here&#x27;s the interactive map: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gps.aquila-it.pl&#x2F;en&#x2F;migration-maps&#x2F;steppe-eagle-russia-kazakhstan" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gps.aquila-it.pl&#x2F;en&#x2F;migration-maps&#x2F;steppe-eagle-russ...</a>

Missed opportunity for Google Fi to offer up some data-only SIMs to emphasize their service and pricing.

I d never guess they were so cosmopolitan

Looking at the map, I wonder how light pollution affects their migration routes.

A solution could be to design the system to make calls directly to a list of ornitologists or ornitologist societies in the other countries, that shouldn&#x27;t be really complicated to arrange and then ask them to return the data by standard e-mail. Is a small world.<p>Or store the eagles travel data in a cloud, that feels also poetically appropriate for this case