Variable evidence of radio-tag backpacks affecting hummingbird time budgets in captivity

With wildlife-tracking devices miniaturizing rapidly to enable ever-more research on ever-smaller taxa, there is a newfound urgency for affordable, field-accessible biologging ethics studies. We designed a 3-hour time-budget experiment to investigate how radio-transmitter backpacks affect hummingbirds’ behavior in Colombia. Using a large flight arena, we individually filmed 25 Black-throated Mangoes (Anthracothorax nigricollis) under two randomized treatments, tagged and untagged, to characteriz