Smog Blog Takes Flight

Pigeons Beam Back Pollution Info From The Air Above Los Angeles

(CBS)  Internet research reveals two new blogs are created every second. But as CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker reports, few can match the originality of the PigeonBlog.

"Blogging pigeons. I don't know; do you think that's what you see every day?" says creator Beatriz da Costa, an artist, engineer and professor at the University of California, Irvine, in smoggy southern California. "I was wondering if there was a way to address air pollution using living organisms of a sort."

Da Costa set out to discover whether lowly pigeons, often considered a public nuisance, could be enlisted to do some public good by monitoring air pollution with tiny tracking devices on their backs.

At first, da Costa's students thought the idea was — pardon the pun — bird-brained. But homing pigeon trainer Bob Matsuyama thought it just might work. "The big thing we had to do was get them used to flying with backpacks on their backs," says Matsuyama.

The team devised a feather-weight minipack with an antenna, a cell phone SIM card, global positioning system equipment and a pollution sensor. The GPS tracks the pigeon's exact location, the sensors pick up airborne pollutants and the information is text-messaged to the Web site.

"I don't want to be cheesy about it. I mean, they're birds," says da Costa. "But yes, they are reporting back information that's interesting and important to us. So I'm using the metaphor in that way of reporting and blogging it."

So the next time you see some pesky pigeons, don't shoo them — Google them, because these birds of a feather blog together.

[noozvuer]

The pigeon blog succeeds as an attention-getting story, but fails as science. Ms. Da Costa deserves credit for implementing a project likely to engage the minds of children. It looks like some nice work went into designing and building the pollution-sensor/ GPS-receiver/ GSM-transmitter, but injecting random behavior by strapping them to the backs of pigeons just eliminates the possibility of drawing any meaningful conclusions. Now that you've got some attention, do something reasonable like sending bicyclists carrying your sensors on routes around the stationary air-quality monitoring sheds you reference and see how that data compares. (Look, Ma-- no pigeons.) Have people carry the sensors in areas where lots of people actually hang out. Google Maps may be great for showing the location of the sensors, but showing numbers is a poor way to convey the pollution levels-- use color contours or something like that. Maybe the best thing you could do would be to share in detail on your website how you got your pollution sensor working in the real world, not just data sheet theory. (BTW, your website template is quirky and it stinks.) And for gosh sakes, get rid of things like this that appeared in the national newscast:

"Speed = 27.2mph (16.9 km/h)"

Errors like that just give comfort to Al Qaeda.

[mkurtzner]

Unfortunately, we make comments without investigation. Only an idiot would compare a pigeon they saw in the park with a racing pigeon. It is typically an American reaction. It is like comparing a donkey to a racehorse. Maybe your reporters could do a little more research before doing a national broadcast. If you would like to know facts about racing pigeons, please contact me.

Mike Kurtzner
VP Camelia Capitol Combine
Fort Sutter Racing Pigeon Club Member

P.S. If you were European, you would have realized your mistake.