Animal motion-capture studio tracks bird flocks and insect swarms

A barn rigged with dozens of cameras and sensors could help scientists better understand the group dynamics and flight patterns of flocks of birds and swarms of insects

By Jeremy Hsu

1 September 2023

Starlings perched in a motion-capture lab built inside a converted barn

Christian Zeigler

An animal behaviour lab built inside a converted barn uses motion-capture cameras to track the movements and behaviours of entire flocks of birds or swarms of insects.

The so-called SMART-BARN resembles a Hollywood motion-capture studio with 30 infrared cameras capable of tracking up to 500 individual markers attached to animal’s bodies. All of this takes place within an area one quarter the size of a standard basketball court, and which can include feeding stations and animal perches.

“We have a very high precision and controllable environment, but with large enough volume for the animals to move and interact much as they do in nature”, says Máté Nagy at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany.

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Nagy and his colleagues showed that their SMART-BARN lab can also track animals without any markers by using six video cameras and computer vision software based on artificial intelligence.  The space also has 30 microphones to record animal sounds and even pinpoint animal locations based on sound.

Experiments with homing pigeons, starlings and African death’s head hawkmoths tracked the real-time locations and body poses of each individual animal – in these studies, researchers attached motion-tracking markers to their heads, or outfitted them with tiny backpacks that hold the trackers. One such study tracked the individual gazes of pigeons to show how the flock’s collective attention switched from food to a possible predator threat.