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Greylag goose tracking
The Wildlife Ecotoxicology team at CSL have been working on greylag geese since 2002, and using GPS satellite tags since 2004.
The study is funded by DEFRA's Pesticides Safety Directorate. In their daily work of assessing agricultural pesticides to see whether they might pose a risk to wildlife on farmland, they need to know how much pesticide an animal, such as a goose, might be exposed to as it goes about its daily life.
One way to get this information is to follow animals carefully and measure how much time they spend in those parts of their habitat where they are likely to be exposed to pesticides, or where they might gather food which has a pesticide residue on it.
As a result of this work, PSD and other pesticide risk assessors, both in government and the pesticide industry, will be able more accurately to assess what pesticides are safe to use.
We've tracked quite a range of farmland species to get this sort of data, including yellowhammer, blackbird, skylark, woodmouse, brown hare and woodpigeon. These are abundant and prevalent species on arable farmland, and can also be used to represent other, similar species in risk assessments.
We added greylags to the list of species because we know that they sometimes graze on arable crops. Grazing animals have to eat a lot of food in order to sustain themselves, which may put them at particular risk if they feed on a crop which as been treated with a pesticide.