The herd draws the map.
Elk cross hills nobody knew they crossed. Deer walk the same corridor every dusk. Put the sensor on the animals that already walk the backcountry and the park maps itself. Scroll — he's wearing it.
Solar. Sealed. Under 1 % of the animal.
A Meshtastic LoRa node on a breakaway harness: GNSS, temperature, humidity, pressure, accelerometer. Logs every minute, beacons every fifteen, charges on its own back. Fitted by the park's biologists under their permits — never by us.
Over a million deer–vehicle collisions a year. The herd knows the crossing.
A season of tracks shows the exact 200 m of highway the herd crosses at 5 AM — where the wildlife crossing, the fence gap or the flashing sign actually goes.
Nodes hung on trees by drone. The whole park pinned in a week.
Sealed solar relays with a hook, flown onto branches along the corridors and ridges — no trench, no pole, no tower permit, no crew on the cliff. Drones also fly the harness checks and the last-heard sweep when someone's overdue.
A bear on the campground loop is an alert, not a surprise.
Same mesh carries the ranger flock and the free trailhead tags: a mountain lion near a trail closes it before the encounter; a hiker who doesn't come back has a last-heard point before dark.
They might not line up for it like the pigeons do.
The pigeons love to work and, we think (or so we heard), volunteer. Deer are more… peaceful about it. They'll walk off into the trees. That's fine. That's the data.
Tag a bear? Yeah. We doubt they'd let us either.
The pigeons sign up by the dozens. The deer would rather not. The bear is the least likely of all to want the job — or the tag. So that one is the park biologists' call, under their permits, on animals they already handle. We hand them the harness and the mesh listens.
He's wearing it anyway. Look at him.
A collared bear on the campground loop is an alert on a ranger's phone, not a surprise at a picnic table. A mountain lion near a trail closes it before the encounter. A hiker who doesn't come back has a last-heard point before dark.
Pin it to the top of the Grizzly Giant.
The best radio tower in the park has been standing for 1,800 years. A drone flies the relay up on a line, a spike crown under the shell bites the highest branch, the strap cinches, the line releases. Two minutes. No trench, no pole, no bolts in the tree.
Fly home. The tree does the tower's job.
One relay in the crown hears every collar and trailhead tag in the valley below and hands them to the ranger station. Crown, ridge, trail — a pilot pins a park's corridors and ridges in a week, ~$60–90 a node, and the node reports its own battery so a quiet one is a ticket before it's a gap.
PidgeyFLok →
02 · Bears
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