The chances of the solar-powered transmitters on two young Taiaroa Head albatrosses starting to transmit again are getting slimmer by the day, researcher Bindi Thomas says.
The transmitters were attached to the 5 or 6-year-old male and female albatrosses in January, but the last signal received from one of the birds was April 13 from the Patagonian continental shelf, about 75km north of the Falkland Islands.
The Massey University doctoral student said it had been hoped the solar-powered transmitters would start up again, as had happened after three and a-half weeks with one of the juvenile birds tracked last year.
"It's now five or six weeks, so it's getting well beyond the point of potentially firing up again."
The lightweight satellite transmitters were attached to the birds' back feathers and sent their GPS location every six hours. Their progress was plotted via satellite every sixth day for mapping and analysis.
There could be many reasons for the birds going "off-line" but researchers would not know for sure until the birds came back to Taiaroa Head in October, Ms Thomas said.
Before the birds went off-line, it was noticed the battery voltage was getting lower which could have been because of less sunlight due to winter or the albatross sitting on the water with its wings covering the solar panel.
It was hoped the technology would allow, for the first time, actual data about the feeding behaviour and migratory patterns of adolescent birds over a year.
While the tracking was for a shorter period than hoped, Ms Thomas said they had still got some valuable data about how the birds left Taiaroa Head, confirming they made increasingly longer trips from the colony and then flew 1200km straight across the ocean to the coast of Argentina without stopping.
