Artist uses pigeons to track smog

San Jose: An American artist has fitted a flock of 15 homing pigeons with miniature cell phones, GPS tracking devices and pollution sensors and released them over the Silicon Valley to track smog levels.

The first 30-minute smog check took place on Tuesday.

The scheme is the brainchild of Beatriz Da Costa, an assistant professor of arts, computation and engineering at the University of California.

She spent a year developing bird-sized cell phones, GPS tracking devices and air pollution monitors that fit inside a special spandex pigeon backpack.

The $250 kits weigh 37 gm, less than a 10th of a pigeon's body weight. The kits measure the levels of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide in the air, and transmit the real-time results back to earth where they are posted on the website pigeonblog.mapyourcity.net.

The flights involve the pigeons' flying some 150 km to measure the differing smog levels around the city and to provide insights into how pollution travels. The experiment is part of a weeklong arts and technology festival in San Jose.

"For me the artistic aspect is that a larger audience can get involved in science and take it out of the expert community," Da Costa said.

"I want to contribute to science," she added. "But I'm not trained as a scientist. If you wanted to do this as a science study, you'd need a few hundred birds and a lot of money, and that's not what we are doing."

But the project has drawn fire from the animal rights group People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The group claims that the high-tech packs could harm the birds and the flights are unnecessary since stationary equipment already in place can take the same measurements.

In a letter protesting the scheme, PETA said the "heavy and cumbersome equipment" strapped to Da Costa's racing pigeons could cause "injury and exhaustion for the birds".

"This is one of the most ridiculous uses for animals we've ever seen," a PETA researcher, Matthew Mongiello said and added,"High-tech instruments already record air pollution levels in the Bay Area. So why endanger these animals?"

But Da Costa said the project was reviewed by an animal ethics panel and had been judged harmless.

"PETA is doing important work, but they should focus on people who really are abusing animals," she said.