Author Archives: alan_k

Great Backyard Bird Count This Weekend

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A very brief note that the annual Great Backyard Bird Count is this weekend, February 17-20th. This citizen science event is put on by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and National Audubon Society. The premise is quite simple: identify the birds you see and hear at a location (could be your backyard, a local park), count them and keep track of how long you were birding, and enter the data on their website. With tens of thousands of people participating, the GBBC gives a powerful snapshot of late winter bird populations, especially those close to where people live.

Welcome Alejandro

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Vermilion Flycatcher

Vermilion Flycatcher

Last month the Patricelli Lab gained a new member- welcome Alejandro Rios-Chelen. Alejandro is a postdoc who did his PhD and a previous postdoc at UNAM in Mexico City. His earlier work includes studies of one of my favorite birds, the Vermilion Flycatcher (Pyrocephalus rubinus). He has looked at various aspects of song plasticity in this species, and in yesterday’s lab meeting took the opportunity to tell us about a study on the effects of urban noise on flycatcher song. It was a really elegant project- investigating variation both within males and between males in song characteristics such as number of song elements and frequency measures- and using simultaneous measures of background noise to help explain this variation. If I had a time machine, I think I would reconsider how we collected data in our meadowlark project.

Alejandro will likely be studying signalling behavior in local songbirds using Gail’s ring array. Welcome Alejandro!

New Resources Page: Graduate School Advice

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Many of the students working in our lab are planning to pursue a professional degree of some sort (medical school, vet school, dental school, pharmacy school, etc), but we always have a few who have “caught the bug”, so to speak, and consider graduate school in the biological sciences. In talking with them, many have a strong passion for the subject matter, but have very little idea of what the process is like to apply to graduate school, nor what graduate school is really like. I have been meaning to put together an advice FAQ to answer some common questions for a long time, and when Gail passed on Joan Strassman’s advice it finally spurred me to collect the other pieces of internet wisdom I’ve seen on this topic, and make a new page. I’ve got points of view from 6 faculty now, which should definitely serve as a good starting point for anyone who is considering graduate school, especially in the sub-fields of evolution or ecology.

New Resources Section: Birds and Birding

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Alan at Elkhorn Slough, looking for birdsJust a quick note that I’ve added another page under Resources. On my old site I had a few links about birds and birding, and I’ve tried to flesh that out somewhat more here. I’ve got a few pieces of advice if you are just getting into birding, links to some birding organizations and resources for bird biology, and descriptions of some of the major datasets for doing your own investigations into bird distributions and population trends. As always, if you have questions I haven’t covered, or if you have a good resource to suggest, let me know and I might add it.

I’ve also renovated a couple of other sections, including the sage-grouse and turkey research pages.

The next page I’ll add is likely to involve useful software packages. Either that, or a start at posting code and other resources I’ve developed.

A couple trips in the way-back machine

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Transect at RFS

Students in the UC Berkeley Bio 1B Field Section study small mammal ecology at the Richmond Field Station

You may have seen the recent news that Lawrence Berkeley Labs may expand into the Richmond Field Station (between Pt. Isabel and Marina Bay, just back from the wetlands at the edge of the SF Bay). I don’t yet have a strong opinion- I haven’t yet read any details about the work they are proposing- but the story caught my eye since I spent quite a bit of time at the RFS during my first year in graduate school at UC Berkeley. I came in without a fellowship and spent the first year TA’ing. Along with most of the incoming students, I was assigned to be a graduate student instructor for the introductory biology course, but I was fortunate to end up in a special field ecology section. At the time, the course was centered on semester long group projects involving small mammal (mouse and vole) ecology in some feral fields in RFS. It was a really fun, valuable (but intense) experience both for me and the students. I think the photo above was taken in 1998.

Going even farther back (1994!), the Ecology and Evolution seminar last week was given by an old acquaintance of mine. Carlos Bustamante and I, along with a couple dozen other interns, spent a summer at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. We were there as part of the undergraduate Research Training Program (a great opportunity for any undergrads out there interested in evolution- I don’t see it listed in their current website but it looks like they now have a huge range of opportunities there). I’ve seen a number of former interns since then, but hadn’t seen Carlos in a very long time. He gave an absolutely phenomenal talk on population genomics- a topic that normally would go zooming over my head but he made it exciting, interesting, and important. Bravo Carlos! No wonder you won the MacArthur genius award!