Member Jody sent in a clipping from the New York Times about an interesting project going on in Australia. Two years ago, Dr. Kate Brandis started a crowd-sourced project through the mail. She asked that Australians send to her, by post, any feathers they found. She will use those feathers and collection information to build a FeatherMap of Australia. The map is a non-invasive way of tracking the bird populations and getting information about the health of the wetlands among many other scientific applications.
To date, Dr. Brandis has received more than 700 envelopes stuffed with thousands of feathers from all over Australia. Australian members, there is still time to participate in the project. Addresses and instructions can be found here. Feathers are accepted for the map through June 29th. You can follow their progress at their Instagram (from which the photo for this post was found).
I love citizen science projects and I love mail; so hearing about this initiative was a real treat. Thanks to Jody for the tip! 
What a cool project!
Posted by: Erica | April 21, 2018 at 10:03 PM