Migrating eagles racked up a huge cellular bill

[JoelR]

Migrating eagles with tracking beacons that send texts reportedly accrued roaming charges so high that scientists had to take out a loan to pay for them, as well as attempt to raise money from a crowdfunding campaign — because some of the birds made unexpected detours (via BBC).

One eagle, Min, was apparently so far off course that its transmitter sent enough texts to eat up the entire tracking budget, according to the BBC. Min was expected to fly to Kazakhstan, where it would have sent a bunch of coordinates over SMS that it collected while out of range of a network. Those texts would have cost of approximately 30 cents each. However, Min apparently flew straight to Iran and the texts were sent from there, where they cost approximately 77 cents each. Come on, Min!

The eagles’ migration routes.

“They really left us penniless,” Igor Karyakin of the Russian Raptors Research and Conservation Network said, according to AFP.

 

This is what happens when you go roaming!

[Sammy]

A clever fallback plan would have been to stop sending the SMSses after receiving some sort of code or sending them in a bigger time span. 😄

[Tomster]

Maybe they should train the eagles to buy a prepaid SIM in the particular country.