Eagle racks up Roaming Charges

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A team of Russian scientists made a monumental miscalculation when they decided to track the flight paths of endangered Steppe Eagles using SMS transmitters. It turns out that migrating eagles fly a long, long way. In the process, the birds ran up international roaming charges that the scientists couldn’t afford to pay. One eagle flew from southern Russia into Kazakhstan and then on into Iran. It fired off a bunch of data messages over the carrier network to share its location and spent the research team’s entire tracking budget in one go. ‘They really left us penniless, we had to take out a loan to feed the tracker device,’ wrote Igor Karyakin of the Russian Raptors Research and Conservation Network. ‘These beasts were out of range in Kazakhstan all summer and once they reached the super expensive Iran and Pakistan, they are spewing out hundreds of text messages with their locations.’

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