TRACKERS -*SPACE*- WALKERS

SPACEWALKING cosmonauts set up an antenna for tracking birds on Earth and sent series of tiny satellites flying from the International Space Station on Wednesday.

Russian Sergey Prokopyev used his gloved right hand to fling four research satellites into space. The first mini satellite safely tumbled away as the space station soared 250 miles above Illinois.

By the time fourth one was on its way 14 minutes later, the station was almost to Spain. Two were the size of a tissue box, while the other two were longer.

With that quickly behind them, Prokopyev and Oleg Artemeyev spent the next several hours  installing the antenna for a German-led animal tracking project known as Icarus, short for  International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space.

The cosmonauts had to unreel, drag and connect long white cables in order to provide power and data to the system. At one point, Artemyev had to pull out a sharp knife to deal with a twisted cable.

''Can you give us some more difficult tasks please?'' Artemyev joked as he routed the cables, a long and tedious chore.

A quick test verified the  Icarus electrical connections. But the cosmonauts were running behind this point, and their spacewalk ended up lasting nearly eight hours, longer than anticipated

The space station is an ideal perch for the antenna  for the antennas, compared with a typical satellite, said project director Martin Wikelski of the  Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany.

That's because spacewalkers could fix something if necessary and the computer is better protected  from space-radiation, he noted.

The project will start out tracking black birds and turtle dove already outfitted with small  GPS tags, then move on to other sing birds, fruit bats and bigger wildlife.

The Honor and Serving of the latest Operational Research on Space Stations and Satellites continues. [Agencies].