Tag Archives: ABGG

Lab Accolades May 2014

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Some hearty congratulations are due for Patricelli lab members!

First, our honors student Rebecca was awarded the College of Biological Sciences citation as one of the top graduates across all biology majors in the college. She has been working with us for several years, most recently on a thesis project to examine vocal behavior in sage-grouse in response to changes in female behavior. She presented this at last month’s Undergraduate Research Conference, and is completing her thesis soon.

Gail, Rebecca, and Anna celibrate Rebecca's award.

Second, recent Ph.D. (and former Wyoming field assistant) Conor Taff received two major honors yesterday. First, Conor’s dissertation was named the Merton Love Award for best dissertation across the ecology graduate groups here at UC Davis. Given the large number of high-quality graduate students here, this is an enormous distinction! He will be giving the Ecology and Evolution seminar next week. Second, he has been given a prestigious young investigator award by the Cooper Ornithological Society [not the American Ornithologists' Union as I originally wrote]. Conor’s dissertation project was an integrative study of development and sexual signalling in a warbler called the Common Yellowthroat. You can read more about it on his website.

Congrats to both Conor and Rebecca!

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.

Meeting Joe

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One downside of an extended field season is missing many of the great visiting speakers that come through UC Davis. This week, the animal behavior graduate group welcomes Bernd Heinrich, a brilliant scientist and prolific author. I’ve read a couple of Bernd’s books on ravens, including Raven in Winter and Mind of the Raven, and was sad to have missed hearing more about his life and research.

However, this week I did get to meet another biologist that I have admired for a long time- Joe Hutto. Joe conducted an imprinting study of wild turkeys that I read early in my graduate career. I mentioned the book and movie adaptation in an earlier post. I recently learned that he lives in Lander, and was excited to meet up with him this spring.

As part of their month-long series of films for Earth Day, the Lander Public Library showed “My Life as a Turkey” on Thursday. After the showing, Joe got up and talked a little about the production of the film, and answered questions from the audience. I got to speak with him a little bit before and after the presentation. Joe was just as warm and thoughtful in person as he comes across in the books and movies. What a treat to finally get to meet him! We didn’t get to talk turkey very much, but I’ll be heading over to his place on Monday for a visit.

I also talked to a few people there about our sage-grouse work. The organizers of the film series were interested in having “What Females Want” (the PBS Nature show featuring our research) for next April.

Cornell Invasion

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The start of the Winter Quarter here at UC Davis has seen a veritable flood of great people from my Alma Mater (Cornell).

Acorn Woodpecker

Acorn Woodpecker at HNHR in Carmel Valley.

First, my PhD co-advisor Walt Koenig came up and gave a talk in the Animal Behavior Graduate Group Friday seminar. Walt and I overlapped at Berkeley, but he since moved to Cornell. It was great to see him, and I was happy to help arrange his visit. We started with a wonderful dinner hosted by Sarah and Dan Hrdy at their almond orchard near Winters. It was really fun to visit with them again, and also to see Walt’s son Dale, who I had not seen since he was in junior high I think (he’s graduated from college now). Walt gave a great overview of the decades of work he has put into the cooperatively breeding acorn woodpeckers at the Hastings Natural History Reservation.

Last week a former professor of mine from Cornell gave the second ABGG talk in the series. Tom Seeley taught Bio 221- Intro to Behavior, which was a really influential class for me. I took it fairly late in my studies- up until that time I had enjoyed courses in organismal biology like Botany, Ornithology, and Vertebrate Morphology, but this was my first formal exposure to animal behavior. The course was team taught by several people in the department, many of whom I already idolized since their field-defining research had been featured in earlier lecture courses. The profs all brought such enthusiasm to the subject and covered so many interesting topics, I was hooked! My only regret was not taking this course earlier so I could have taken more that a single upper division course in behavior.

Tom gave a fantastic series of two talks on decision making in bees. On Thursday he spoke about how they decide on where to go when they need to find a new hive, and on Friday he described how the scout bees actually guide the whole swarm from its old home to the new one. It was very cool to see both of those talks together, and Tom did a great job of story telling to weave them both together into a narrative about how groups of animals can sometimes solve problems that they could not figure out by themselves. I think the faculty members in the audience especially appreciated his analogies to how university committees work (or don’t work, as the case may be).

I also was able to catch up with Andrea Townsend, a new hire in the Wildlife Fish and Conservation Biology department on crows. Andrea did her PhD at Cornell, and although we did not overlap, we share many friends in common and had run into each other at several meetings. She is hired as an urban bird ecologist, and I may pick her brain about possible future directions for research on turkeys.