Author Archives: alan_k

Great Backard Bird Count this Weekend

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This Stellar's Jay is just one species I might get to see in by backyard this weekend.

I am a regular participant in the Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count, which is one probably it’s most well-known and longest running citizen science project (you can read more about this here). Audubon has a number of other citizen science efforts, including one taking place this weekend: the Great Backyard Bird Count. I see the GBBC as something of a cross between the CBC (targeted searching in a limited area during a specified time of the year, repeated year after year) and eBird from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which is the more flexible bird-sightings platform for reporting (and viewing) bird occurrences from anywhere in the world at any time. So consider keeping track of your bird sightings this weekend, even if it’s just the birds seen at the feeders in your yard or at your neighborhood park, and help put together a robust snapshot of late-winter bird populations.

I’ll also say eBird is a great general tool *for* birding, as it maintains lists for you and allows you to see what species people are finding.

Upcoming Davis Events

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For those of you in the Davis area, I’d like to point out a couple of great events coming up next weekend (Feb 23rd).

 

Yolo Bypass Wetlands

If you’re looking for something out of doors, nearby Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area is hosting the annual Duck Days bird celebration. YBWA sits just off I-80 along the causeway into Sacramento. It’s a fantastic place to see wildlife at pretty much any time of year. It’s also somewhere we’ve taken out-of-town speakers to go birding, and even done some sound recording for various projects in the lab (generally projects involving birds coping with traffic noise). For a nice write up about Duck Days in the Daily Aggie, click here.

 

The second event is the UC Davis Regional Animal Behavior Student Conference. Every other year, the symposium is opened up to students from other northern California schools, leading to a fantastic mix of talks and a fun opportunity for local behavioral biologists to get to meet each other. I can take a tiny bit of credit for spurring this along- I had attended a similar meeting in Southern California (the Southern California Animal Behavior, or SCAB, conference) while I was finishing up at Berkeley, and was hoping to replicate something like that here. I floated the idea to some faculty at Davis, and basically got the reaction: “Why would we need to invite people in, we’ve got such a great program here!?” Fortunately a couple of years later the students in ABGG were deciding what to do with a modest budget surplus, and I floated the idea of expanding their annual research conference to include nearby schools. Anyway, it’s a great chance to hear about cutting-edge research from the best and brightest at UC Davis and elsewhere.

January 2013 presentations

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Early January was pleasantly busy. It started with the SICB (Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology) meeting held in San Francisco. This was my first SICB, and I was really impressed. It was one of those meetings where you really learned a lot, whether it was cutting edge techniques or fascinating studies on all sorts of organisms (or, most likely, both at once). I’ve usually been to meetings that either focused on birds, or else more narrowly on the sorts of animals (fish, insects, birds, mammals) that are typically featured at animal behavior meetings. SICB really does have everything from fossils to enzyme activity in symbiotic bacteria to bird phylogeography. It’s also very student friendly- as much or moreso than Animal Behavior Society. I’ll heap on one more point of praise- the poster sessions were fairly well run, with plenty of space to get around. This is something almost every meeting does wrong by packing too many posters into to small a space.

 

I presented the more-or-less final version of the laterality study, and people seemed pretty interested in it.

 

Talking about grouse

I left SICB early to head down to Monterey where I was scheduled to speak to the Monterey Peninsula Audubon Society. This was a fun opportunity; one of my first public lectures as a graduate student was to this same group more than 10 years ago. I was reminiscing about that talk, and how that was in the era when people were starting to give Powerpoint presentations on the computer (rather than getting slides developed), but nobody actually had projectors yet. I showed up not knowing that if I wanted to give a talk from the computer I needed to bring my own projector! I managed to come up with an improvised solution- they did have a media projector that accepted composite input, and I happened to have a video camera from my field studies in my car, so I was able to film my laptop screen with a hi-8 camera. Not ideal, but better than not having any AV at all!

 

Maybe somewhat appropriately, we had a bit of a scramble to get the audio speakers set up this time around as well, but it all worked out. The audience seemed to enjoy the talk and especially the high speed video of the grouse displays. Folks kept me there for a long time with great questions, and apparently I was even on public access TV. I even got to meet the mother and father-in-law of Marc Dantzker, one of our collaborators.

 

Of course no trip to Monterey is complete without a stop at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Even with the sea otter exhibit closed for construction and no mola mola in the big Outer Bay tank, it’s still a magical place to go. I’m sure I’m not alone in this thought: standing in the dark watching the jellyfish or big tuna tank is almost a religious experience.

Outer Bay Tank at Monterey Bay Aquarium

 

I’ve been to the aquarium several times, and each time there’s something new to see. I think my favorite part was getting an up close look at a Laysan Albatross that some handlers brought out in front of the kelp tank. I also had fun using my new macro lens to get photos of shorebirds in the aviary.

 

Laysan Albatross

Phalarope in Monterey Bay Aquarium

Although we missed up close looks at sea otters at the aquarium, we did see them several places along the coast there, including some really nice looks right by the wharf in downtown Monterey.

Sea Otter

Two big updates from the fall

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The big updates from last quarter are probably the following:

1)   I survived teaching my first class- the 175-student Intro to Evolution course here in the Department of Evolution and Ecology at UC Davis. It was definitely a scramble to get the lectures put together each week, and I can see areas for improvement both for the course content and my teaching style, but all in all I think it went pretty well. At least no pitchforks and torches outside of my office, and reasonably good student evaluations- very few marks below average in any of the categories. Although it really is amazing how much time it takes to outline a lecture and craft a set of powerpoint slides, I enjoyed scouring the web for interesting class examples and media, and I liked the time in front of the class (at least most of the time- 7:30 AM could be rough if I didn’t sleep well or was up late putting the finishing touches on the lecture.

While I’m on this topic, a big thank you to my TAs David Luecke and Sarah Signor, as well as my graders Matt Meisner and Dena Grossenbacher. They did a fantastic job in spite of my having to learn everything from scratch my first time through as a full instructor. I’ve thanked them several times already, but can’t hurt to do it once more.

 

2)   Gail and I were awarded our second full National Science Foundation research grant on the sage-grouse system this fall! This proposal will fund another 3 years of field studies in Wyoming. The focus of this grant will be to learn more about the foraging ecology of the grouse, and how variation in energy acquisition and off-lek behavior relate to the courtship tactics available to a male while wooing females on the lek. It will extend our use of robots and sound recording by giving us a lot more information on what males are doing in the remaining 21 hours of the day when they aren’t fighting and strutting on the lek.

This project will also include both old and new collaborations. We are welcoming back John Burt (University of Washington) who was a key developer for most of our sound analysis scripts. In the past few years he has turned his attention to creating next-generation telemetry tags for use in animal behavior studies. These Encounternet tags can do amazing things like share interaction histories so when either of two animals gets near a receiving station, it will receive the data from both animals. The tags John is creating for us should have both gps logging capability as well as accelerometers to measure movements (this technology has already been used in other animal systems, such as the mountain lion study out of UC Santa Cruz). Our second collaborator is Jennifer Forbey from Boise State University. Jennifer studies the interactions between sage-grouse and their main food item- sage brush. She will be helping us study foraging success in the grouse, in particular by measuring the suite of secondary chemicals that sage plants produce.

2012 Christmas Bird Counts

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Intrepid birders braving the rain.

I’m back to the blog- I do have a bit to catch up on. First, the 2012 Christmas Bird Count. I’ve talked a bit about these counts in the past, so you can read a bit more background in an older post.

I was able to continue my new tradition of helping census birds in two of the nearby count circles. The first count was in the Oakland area, and once again I met up with fearless leader Kevin along with regulars Steve, Phil (and some newcomers) to find birds in our part of the map. We have a fantastic territory in the northern edge of the overall count circle; it stretches from the south side of Pt. Isabel down to Gilman St. and Golden Gate fields, and up through Albany and El Cerrito more or less to the top of the ridge in the Berkeley Hills. This area covers a surprising variety of habitats including the open bay and shoreline with it’s mudflats and marsh, some ponds in the horse track infield, some oak woodland with a stream on the back side of Albany Hill, and a mix of trees in the Sunset View Cemetery.

Black-and-White Warbler, Albany, CA

We had unusually nice weather, and at least one pretty good bird, a Black-and-White warbler that Kevin found between Albany Hill and the Ranch 99 parking lot. This is a migrant that isn’t typically found here even during the breeding season, so finding one in the winter is pretty uncommon. I had my camera along and managed to get a couple of decent photos that Golden Gate Audubon was able to use for a number of their press releases for the event. The day ended with a grand total of 116 species of birds- pretty good number for a square mile or two of extremely urbanized real estate. The total for all territories in the Oakland count circle was around 177 or so, which seemed to be “good but not great” in terms of species diversity.

River Otter in Pleasant Hill

The second count was Central Contra Costa County (it’s 15 mile circle is centered in Walnut Creek). It started out much less promising- it was pouring buckets as I drove out to meet leaders Hugh and Rosita in Pleasant Hill. This territory isn’t quite as productive as the Albany site, but we were just happy that the rain let up. No particular highlights as rare as the black-and-white warbler, but we ended up with close to 90 species, including several that were relatively rare for our area (Peregrine Falcon, White-throated Swift, Least Sandpiper to name a few). The entire count circle had around 154 species seen that day- getting more than 150 is seen as good for the this count so I’d guess the organizers were happy with the outcome. The highlight for me was seeing a river otter in downtown Pleasant Hill next to Diablo Valley College.

A few other photos from the two days.

Of course, it’s the data that are important, and if you are interested in learning more about one of the longest running and most popular citizen science programs in existence, you can go to the Audubon Christmas Bird Count website.