Opportunities for monitoring feeding behavior using RFID technology to support bird welfare in zoos

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Birds are one of the most speciose taxa housed in zoos, but there is little research about their welfare and management in aviaries. Managing birds in large, complex, multi-species spaces potentially provides welfare benefits, but monitoring animals in these spaces can be challenging. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology is widely used for monitoring the behavior of wild birds but is underutilized for monitoring birds in zoos. RFID is a valuable technology allowing for data stream-style automated detections of presence, date, time, and location data. This review discusses the ways that RFID data can be used to interpret feeding and social behavior to inform data-driven management when placed at the feeding area, providing information on duration of feeding, number of bouts, preference and social association like feeding together and agonistic displacements. It then discusses how this information can be practically applied in a zoo scenario for collecting general information about animals for which little is known, monitoring welfare concerns, and assessing the potential effects of husbandry changes. This review then expands on how RFID can be paired with other tools such as visual observation, weighing scales, and selection feeders. This review highlights the importance of validating RFID detections against visual observations to ensure accuracy and understand biases. Lastly, this review discusses the value of this RFID data for conservation, and opportunities to implement RFID in other locations beyond the feeder.