Category Archives: field work

Blood secrets

Posted on by
10

Sometimes doing science feels like doing magic. Take a fantastical witch brewing eye of toad and nightshade flower in a cauldron, substitute a 1.5 ml tube for the cauldron, AW1 Buffer for the nightshade flower, and blood of junco for the eye of toad, and that’s me.

(And that “eye of ___” thing happens in science too: a few of my herpetologist colleagues have been talking lately about what you can learn from preserved lizard eyes.)

One of the things I do when I capture a junco is to collect a blood sample. I use a sterile needle, collect very little blood, and don’t let the bird go until I’m sure the bleeding has stopped. The birds usually don’t even flinch. They act much more upset when I blow on their chests to look for brood patches (I think it feels cold to them) than they do when I take blood.

Me collecting blood from GRAY. The blood moves up the tiny capillary tube on its own. Photo by M. LaBarbera.

Continue reading →

October in the mountains

Posted on by
6

The field season is mostly over. My field assistants are back in classes; my mist nets are packed away. (Many thanks to the people who kept us fed and equipped by donating a total of $1450 to this field season!) It’s grant-writing, lab work, and data analysis season now.

Well, almost. I really want to know what the juncos do when summer ends. Our working assumption is that they migrate down the mountains to escape the worst of the winter weather, but we don’t know how far they go, or when, or, really, if they do that at all. So this week I went back to look for them.

SOSA, photographed on his territory earlier this year, was nowhere to be found. Photo by M. LaBarbera.

Continue reading →

Non-birds of the field II: mammals

Posted on by
7

All photos in this post are by M. LaBarbera.

Belding’s ground squirrel

Stand at one of our high-elevation sites, and at any given moment, you will be under surveillance by at least two Belding’s ground squirrels.

You might not see them, but down in the grass and the flowers, they are watching.

Continue reading →

Non-birds of the field I: invertebrates

Posted on by
4

From most of the pictures on this blog, you might think that the only animals we saw this summer were the ones that flew into our nets. Not so!

Big red fuzzy moth

Of course, whether I can identify these non-birds is a different matter entirely. If you see anything you recognize, please comment and let me know what these exoskeleton-clad creatures are.

Continue reading →

Field assistants make the world go ’round

Posted on by
1

By far the biggest reason that this field season has gone as well as it has is that I have had absolutely fantastic field assistants. Field assistants do much more than simply “assisting”—although that alone is important: I could not take my color-standard photographs alone, I would have trouble setting up a mist net alone, and it would take me much longer to process each junco alone, meaning more stress for the bird.

Jennifer recording data as I measure SSOA

Anthony being a human mist net support where the ground was too hard to put stakes in

Continue reading →

Bycatch catch-up

Posted on by
2

I’m quite behind in my bycatch* posts! All of the birds in this post were caught several trips ago.

*Bycatch: birds that fly into our nets while we are trying to catch juncos. We extract them from the net, take a few photos, and release them.

Female Brewer’s Blackbird:

I am too zen to be bothered by you, giant pink monster

Actually, not

Continue reading →

Last chick of the season

Posted on by
3

If you get too close to a nest or a young fledgling, the parent juncos will often give a repeated, angry chip call. I don’t understand how this could possibly be adaptive—I would understand a snake-like hiss, or a tiger roar, but no one’s scared of “chip”—but as silly as it is for the parents to broadcast, effectively, “My nest is here, don’t come find it!” I do appreciate the help.

On our last trip we noticed SNAE and his unbanded mate chipping insistently.

SNAE. I photograph all the juncos I catch from several angles like this; the color standard card you see in the background lets me compare colors among pictures, to look at color differences among the juncos.

Continue reading →

Fledglings!

Posted on by
27

On our last trip, finally, we managed to catch some fledglings. We had been seeing them around for weeks, but as they didn’t seem to respond to playback, and they never flew the right direction when we tried to chase them into the net, we’d caught none.

On this last trip something had changed. No longer were all of the fledglings attended by their parents; instead, they formed foraging flocks of parents, attended fledglings, and apparently-independent fledglings. Attended fledglings are hard to catch because their parents lead them away from danger. Independent fledglings, it turns out, aren’t so careful. We set up the net where we observed the flock foraging, and within ten minutes the juncos drifted back into the area and resumed foraging.

BOAR was the first fledgling we caught.

BOAR

Continue reading →

Jerk juncos

Posted on by
Reply

Although the last month has brought nests, chicks, and all the excitement they entail, it has also seen increasingly frustrating field work. In the beginning of the field season, we caught between two and five juncos every day; now we’re down to two, one, or none.

Some of them simply don’t respond to our playback at all. Locations that we know have juncos—because we’ve seen them, darnit, we’ve banded them—appear junco-less, our Radio Shack speaker spewing junco calls with no response. Other juncos respond half-heartedly, distractedly. They sing for a minute, then resume foraging. Or, as I watched GAEL do recently, they sing back softly while preening their feathers.

GAEL ignoring us. Photo by M. LaBarbera.

We spend a lot less time handling birds now, and a lot more time muttering, “Jerk juncos.”

Continue reading →