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Campus Birds

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Yellow-billed Magpies

Yellow-billed Magpies, Davis, CA

With fall quarter beginning, students are not the only things flocking to campus. Many songbirds are migrating through from northern breeding grounds, or returning to the lowlands after spending the summer in higher elevations up in the mountains.

This gives me a good excuse to mention the UC Davis Birders group, an informal group of students and staff who enjoy watching local birds. We periodically tour part of the Arboretum over our lunch hour and see how many species of birds we can find. This is a fun time of year to be out, since almost every outing we will see some new migrant species on it’s way south, or get to welcome another winter resident back to the Central Valley.

All skill levels welcome- we’ve had people with very little experience join us and over time become more skilled at bird ID.

If you are interested in learning more, or getting added to our email list, just send me an email. You can also visit the group’s new page on Facebook.

ABS/IEC Meeting

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Becca at her poster

Becca at her poster

I can’t believe it has already been two months since the behavior meeting in Bloomington, Indiana. I think everyone considered it an extremely successful meeting. There were somewhere in the neighborhood of 1200 people in attendance, which is at least twice the size of a typical meeting in this field. The contingent from the IEC added more european flair than you might normally find at the primarily North American Animal Behavior Society conference.

There was a strong lab contingent from the Patricelli Lab. Teresa’s work was featured in the Allee competition- the prestigious student paper presentation that is one of the hallmarks of the meeting. Her work on environmental cues and signaling risk in scrub jays was well received, and maybe I’m biased, but stood out as really novel among the other talks I saw. Great job, Teresa! Conor’s talk on yellowthroats was fantastic, and his talk was well attended in spite of being on the very last day.

We presented two posters on the sage-grouse work. Becca put together a fantastic poster on her work on the mechanically-generated swish notes in the sage-grouse display. She was, I think, the first undergraduate student in our lab to present at a national meeting. I hope she will be an example to more students in the lab: if you have the motivation and time, you can definitely come out of school with a research product you can be proud of. I also presented a multi-authored poster on lateralization of behavior in sage-grouse. We combined data from how males aim during courtship and how they face during aggressive interactions to see if there are any side-biases in how males orient during these social interactions.

Both posters are up outside of our lab on the 2nd floor of Storer if any Davis-ites want to take a look.

WonderLab

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Gail & robot at Wonderlab

Gail demonstrates the robot at the Wonderlab in Bloomington, Indiana

I’ll start my recap of the Animal Behavior Society/International Ethological Congress at the end of the conference rather than the beginning. The afternoon after the final luncheon, Emilie Snell-Rood from the University of Minnesota organized a fantastic outreach event at WonderLab, a local children’s museum. This event really was a stroke of genius- the idea was to have some of the multitude of animal behavior researchers here for the conference put together a small, hands-on exhibit related to their research. We all got to wear snazzy name-tags like this:

We actually had four Patricelli Lab folks there, besides Gail and I, Conor Taff took off his Common Yellowthroat hat and helped us talk about sage-grouse, and recent undergraduate Becca Koch, who presented a poster at the meeting, also helped answer questions. Not surprisingly, the kids were most enthralled by the fembot (Gail even let them drive!), and our display was one of the more popular ones inside. Some of the parents were pretty curious as well- they had a bit more patience for the high-speed videos we showed on laptops.

The other exhibits were also really fun and some were quite creative, from feeding live spiders, marking butterflies, banding birds, describing dog emotions, and many others. A local (Bloomington) article about the program can be viewed here, and Emilie Snell-Rood also posted on her blog about the event.

Summer 2011 Updates

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Anna's Hummingbird

Anna's Hummingbird, Mendocino, CA

Time for a few updates from the summer. In a future post I’ll mention the 2011 Animal Behavior Society/International Ethological Congress that I recently attended in Bloomington, Indiana. In the mean time, a few notes about this web page…

First, a brief acknowledgement that since I added the visitor-counting widget ClusterMaps in the fall of 2009 [note, this is the old .mac site, the counter starts over on the new site], I’ve now received more than 1000 visitors from more than 30 countries. Ok, so these aren’t viral cat video numbers, but still it is nice to see peoples stopping by to check out our research. If you haven’t noticed the map, it is on the bottom of the main page.

Second, I’ve updated the Publications page with .pdfs of some of my recent papers. These include:

A commentary on the utility of Opportunity for Selection measures in sexual selection research, still online only in the Journal of Experimental Biology. I had several great co-authors on this paper: Mike Webster, Adam Jones, Steve Shuster, and Emily DuVal.

A review of the use of terrestrial microphone arrays, spearheaded by Dan Blumstein that appeared in the Journal of Applied Ecology. This paper emerged from an NSF-funded workshop a few years ago that Dan organized , with many of the participants helping with the manuscript.

Gail and I, along with our colleague Richard McElreath from Anthropology, investigated how economic models of bargaining and negotiation can be useful for understanding the dynamics of animal courtship on the lek. This invited paper was recently published in Current Zoology.

Finally, I scanned in the two book chapters I have helped to write. The most recent was published just this May. Emily DuVal and I were able to write the review on cooperative courtship in birds that we had been talking about for at least a decade. Somehow we managed to stick this in as an invited chapter in a new book on Evolutionary Family Psychology. I also now have available the chapter on Reproductive Skew in Birds that my PhD advisor Walt Koenig wrote with myself, Joey Haydock, and Shen-Feng Shen that was published a couple of years ago.

Again, links for these can be found on the publications page. Hopefully we’ll have some more empirical papers ready to go soon!

[Note- photo is an Anna’s Hummingbird- I took the photo this summer in Mendocino, CA]

Packing up and leaving

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Not much to say about the hell that is packing up camp. After running full speed for our 2-month-plus season, it is always sooooo tempting to take a couple of days to relax. This never happens though, since, when the end is in sight we are usually ready to get back to California as quickly as possible. It always seems like packing up camp should be a 2-day job- one to pack, one to clean, but it always takes much longer than this, especially when we are down to just 2 people. A whole day can be eaten up by, for example, making two runs into Riverton to wash the ATV’s and drop them off at Four Seasons. To throw added salt in the wounds, we got a dose of weather during our last 2 days of packing. Thankfully we didn’t get snow this time, but lots of rain ensured that everything would be wet and muddy. Yuck. Let’s hope our stack of lumber isn’t a moldy, rotten mess when we take the tarp off next year.

We also fit in time to spend a morning with Sue (BLM) and Greg (Game and Fish) to head out to the Gas Hills near Shoshoni and train them in the use of the sound pressure level, or SPL, meters. They’ll try to collect some ambient noise readings while we are gone, and possible measure the noise level at a lek or two.

Finally, with the RV dropped off in Riverton, the office trailer cleaned up, and the vehicles packed up, we were ready to hit the road. Our one small detour on the trip back was to a fossil area near Farson, on the west side of the pass from Lander. The view of the Wind River Range from this side of the continental divide is even more spectacular than from our camp.



Gail had found this site a couple of years ago using one of the roadside geology books- otherwise there is not much to indicate it’s presence.



One area had a lot of fossil fish in mounds of broken shale, and nearby was another area with a lot of petrified wood, some of which were clustered around what were stumps of ancient trees. Very cool!

Not much else to report- the rest of the ride back was smooth, and the Harry Potter audio book I borrowed from Gail carried me much of the way through Nevada. A quick stop at Cabella’s on the way through Reno, and we were back to Davis! Field season over!