UNITY -- Clifton Dassuncao was having trouble reaching someone on his cell phone Tuesday evening at Unity College. That's probably to be expected when you are trying to call another life form.

Dassuncao was not trying to phone home. Instead, he was using technology being developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to call owls in hopes of someday gaining a better understanding of the state's owl population.

"It's pretty simple," said Dassuncao, a junior environmental engineering student at MIT. "All you do is play it back and listen."

While the concept is simple, the application is unique and exciting for ornithologists and others who study owl populations. Essentially, researchers at MIT have turned cell phones into electronic surveyors. Once perfected, the surveyors will be able to control the cell phones remotely to call for owls and then record responses.

Maine Audubon has used similar techniques in owl surveys for six years, but the cell phones will allow surveyors to listen longer and in more areas than they have been able to do with just human volunteers.

"There are a lot of questions about owl surveying that we can't really answer unless we engage technology like this or get a huge number of people," said Susan Gallo, wildlife biologist for the Maine Audubon Society.

Dale Joachim, visiting professor at MIT, has been working on the cell phone technology sporadically for more than three years.

"The (MIT Media) Lab tries to come up with ways to use current technology that is cheaper and more effective," said Dassuncao.

The system consists of a Nokia cell phone that is hooked to a listening device and a loud speaker, which sends out the call that is designed to elicit a response from the owls.

The listening device, called a hanger, has built-in Bluetooth technology that allows researchers to send and receive data from the device through the cell phone. The hanger is not only able to record owl calls, but reads essential data such as time, temperature and humidity. The four cones on the hanger, which are plastic lab funnels, help pick up sound and feed it to four microphones. Using a built-in compass, the hanger can calculate the direction from which the call came.

The units were first tested in Connecticut, but Maine, which Gallo said is leading the way nationally when it comes to studying owls, was a natural fit to give the units a real workout using more than one phone, Joachim said.

"It's an appropriate venue for comparing what the machines could do, what technology could bring to the table and what people conventionally have done in Maine," he said.

Joachim hoped the units would be ready for testing during the 2007 survey last March, but the first units were tried here in Maine in May. The devices were set up about 20 feet apart in a parking lot at Unity College.

"We spent most of the time trying to figure out how to make the phones talk to the listening devices and play back," said David Potter, professor at Unity College. Potter, who has participated in all six years of the owl survey, has kept in close contact with Joachim since Potter attended a event at MIT to unveil the cell units in February.

"I don't think Dale was satisfied that the quality of listening was very good."

Joachim continues to perfect the process and it already worked much better when Dassuncao returned last week to give the systems another try. He was able to record owls with the phones the first night -- Potter was uncertain about subsequent tests over the next couple of nights -- with the devices spread farther from each other.

Surveyors hope the devices will be tested during the next owl survey in March 2008.

There are other problems to solve, including the relatively short lives of cell phone batteries, waterproofing, and Maine's spotty cell phone reception. Satellite phones would work anywhere in the state, Dassuncao said, but researchers have limited funding.

"Dale jokes the real reason we use owls to study is because cell phones get free nights and weekends," Dassuncao said.

The devices could be used in a variety of applications such as animal surveys and military defense, Joachim said. Pacific Northwest loggers, for instance, are required by federal law to closely monitor the endangered spotted owls that live in the region.

All the information gathered by the units is sent back to MIT and will one day be fed into a Web site that will be available to the public.

"A natural fit would be for it to be used in population surveys," Joachim said. "It makes the debate much more public, much more open and much more objective."

While they will never replace humans, the cell units could help gather information in areas where there are few monitors, such as Aroostook County, Washington County and the western mountains, Gallo said.

"People are more reliable and they can give us more information," she said. "There's no replacing people out there."

Even in areas with ample volunteers, the cell units could add information that human beings alone cannot gather. For example, surveyors currently follow a pattern along a route of listening, playing an owl call, and then moving along to the next designated spot to follow the same routine. It is unusual to hear a responding owl at the first stop, but by the second or third owls are almost always responding, Potter said. He wonders if owls have started responding at previous stops.

"What if we could listen to these responses all along the route at once?" Potter asked.

Then there is the simple matter that human beings need to eat and sleep, while cell phones just need a new battery every now and then.

"If you set up a cell phone, it might get cold, but it isn't going to get tired unless the battery goes down, but it will sit there all night," Potter said.

In that way, they are the ultimate night owl.

Craig Crosby -- 861-9253

ccrosby@centralmaine.com