Inside Disney’s high-tech mission to protect the Great Lizard Cuckoo at Lookout Cay jacob.krol@futurenet.com (Jacob Krol) | usagoldmines.com

When Disney Cruise Line opened its new island destination in the Bahamas – Disney Lookout Cay at Lighthouse Point – it wasn’t just a vacation spot for island visitors. Instead, in coordination with its Animals, Science, and Environment (ASE) team, the brand launched a major conservation project that combined wildlife biology with modern technology, including radio telemetry and 3D printing.

While Disney Lookout Cay opened in June 2024, planning had been underway well before then, with the ASE Conservation team included from the start. A key decision was that Disney wouldn’t develop more than 16% of the land.

“We were going to leave a lot of the critical habitat, such as forest habitat, intact for the animals that were already living there,” Lauren Puishys, a Conservation & Science Tech with Disney’s ASE team, explained.

“We created an environmental impact analysis before any construction began,” Puishys said. That then turned into an Environmental Management plan, which was focused on learning about the bird population on the island and protecting them.

The team identified key zones on the island that would remain untouched based on where birds were nesting, migrating, or foraging – all gathered through on-the-ground fieldwork. “You’re collecting every bird you see, every bird you hear, and you’re just writing this down to make observations about how many of these birds are in this region,” Puishys said.

One species quickly emerged as important, though – the great lizard cuckoo. “They’re noisy, they’re really cool looking,” Puishys explained, calling them ‘incredibly smart.’ Now, to track a population, though, in terms of patterns when moving around the island and where they were choosing to nest, Puishys and team combined old with new.

In this case, the team turned to the art of 3D printing to get close to the bird species in question, and then, through radio telemetry, mapped them on the island.

“I need a very specific bird,” Puishys recalled telling her colleague, Jose Dominguez, a member of Disney’s ASE Behavioral Husbandry team. Though he’s 3D modeled a variety of enrichment items for Disney’s Animal Kingdom theme park, he didn’t necessarily have experience modeling birds, so he called on other expert teams at Disney that did.

Disney has teams unsurprisingly well-versed in 3D modeling using CADs and tools like Blender. “They were like, ‘Oh, absolutely, I would love to work on this,’” explained Dominguez.

They collaborated for months, refining the model through regular Zoom calls. “Lauren provided her input on if it was too big or it needs an extra toe, things like that,” said Dominguez. “Eventually, we got to our desired model shape, the great lizard cuckoo.”

The model was printed in PLA, a plant-based plastic, which Dominguez said is what Disney routinely uses for deployments in “behavior-based enrichment.” The model was then coated with the same durable outdoor paint used across properties. More specifically, “an outdoors acrylic-based UV-resistant paint, and then with a protective clear coating on top.

The outcome? A decoy bird coupled with audio recordings of real bird calls. It worked and was deployed.

“We had it down there with the speaker underneath it, and we had two different types of calls on there,” Puishys said. “At one point, an actual great lizard cuckoo called back and forth to it… So it was actually trying to communicate with the model, which was incredible to see.”

Finally, a bird approached the decoy, and Puishys was ready for it. “I was in the woods, out of sight from the cuckoo but in sight of the model, so I could see it myself. And then all I had to do was step out of the woods, and the bird was in the net.”

From there, the team attached a solar-powered radio telemetry tag to track the bird. “So there’s small solar panels on it with a little antenna, and that’s giving off a radio frequency of 434 megahertz,” Puishys said. “We have infrastructure around property on the rooftops of buildings and cell towers that’s actually created to pick up that signal, which has an associated identifying eight-digit number and letter code for that animal.”

Thanks to the tag and the infrastructure installed around the island in an unintrusive manner, Puishys can now track bird movements from her desk in Florida.

“We work pulling everything off of the cloud with an API key through the company, and we can just download it all to my desk using RStudio,” she said. “We’ve had it up now since pre-construction and now have over 35 million data points associated with this.”

That data is captured through a highly structured array of nodes across the island, with about 25 of them being spaced around 400 meters apart.

Further, the data is stored on those nodes, then sent to the sensor station, which processes it and is uploaded via a cellular network so that the team can access it from anywhere. That includes Puishys’s desk in Florida, and it’s the most data the ASE team has ever collected on a terrestrial species.

For Puishys, the most exciting part isn’t just the success of the project – it’s how early they were brought in. “I honestly think our involvement as a Conservation team in the development of Disney Lookout Cay was our biggest leap,” Puishys said. “It kind of blew me away… and it was a big part about why I was so happy to join the team and help out with the project.”

The hope is that this approach – one that blends science, tech, and collaboration – becomes a template for future projects. “We hope that it worked out well enough that we can kind of be an example or a good model for other construction projects moving forward,” Puishys said.

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