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!