This week we’ve had a guest: Patricia Brennan from U Mass Amherst. I first got to know Patty when we were both in graduate school- she was working on the mating system of tinamous, and I was working working on wild turkeys; we commiserated over the trials of studying large ground-nesting birds with high nest predation rates.

Patty is now forging ahead in a new research direction, understanding genital morphology in males and females (mostly in birds, but expanding into other groups as well), and how these morphologies relate to mating behaviors and strategies, social environments, and conflict between the sexes. Her first model system has been ducks, since the ducks have amazingly elaborated genital morphology, as well as some rather unsavory reproductive strategies.

On Tuesday, Patty and I met up with Andy and Irene Engilis at the Wildlife museum to do some galliform bird dissections. Patty taught me how to remove intact reproductive tracts from birds we might be dissecting, and I taught her what we needed in terms of vocal tracts. We looked at some willow ptarmigan, as well as spruce grouse. The dissections all went pretty well, although a lot of the birds were collected in the fall (not as good for Patty since birds have seasonal reductions in their reproductive tracts), and the syrinx of the male sage grouse was damaged when it was shot.

Wednesday morning, as a beautiful red sun rose above the haze, Patty and I, along with Conor and Melissa (grad students) and Becca and Travis (undergraduates in our lab) went birding at a nearby wetlands called the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area. We had hopes of finding a couple of vagrant species that had been seen recently by local birders. Although we struck out on these, we had nice looks at some other birds, including this Sora (photo above).