Duke University | Howard Hughes Undergraduate Program

Greetings from Pymatuning! I'm in Pennsylvania staying at the University of Pittsburg Pymatuning Laboratory of Ecology (PLE) to learn how field work is done in the Nowicki
Lab (i.e., field work at its best). After a quick flight from RDU to Pittsburg, the drive to the lab takes another two hours or so. I arrived on Thursday night, the 18th, and settled in to the researchers' apartment I'm sharing with Irene, a graduate student in the lab who studies red-winged blackbirds. Now it's Saturday, and this is the first chance I've had to get on a computer to tell you about my adventures-- and oh, have there been adventures. Before I jump to the journal entries I've been keeping over the past few days, I'll give you a little background info about what I'm trying to accomplish up here.

As I've said before, the Nowicki Lab studies animal communication using swamp sparrows as its subjects. As you probably know, to be taken seriously in the scientific community, you usually have to provide some convincing data, and to get this data, you usually have to set up some sort of test. So, the Nowicki Lab needs sparrows to do behavioral tests on, and you can't just order those from a catalog; you must physically go out and obtain them. That is why I'm up here: to assist the team in capturing female swamp sparrows that we can bring back to Duke and begin to prep them to use in our experiments using operant conditioning. I won't be using these females in my tests; we have hand-reared females back at the lab that I'll work with. But, if the Nowicki Lab needs sparrows, then I'm more than happy to gain some experience in the field by helping to get them!

The people that I'm working with up here (Team Sparrow, if you will) are Dr. Steve Nowicki, the PI; Rindy Anderson, sparrow-wrangler extraordinaire and the person who designed the operant chambers I'll be using in my tests back at Duke; and Rindy's partner in crime, Casey. Our mission is to bring home eight females, though we probably won't catch that many during the weekend that I'm here.

Something that was interesting to me is that doing field work doesn't necessarily leaving civilization behind-- most of the sites we've been to have been just off the road (although since it's a pretty small town, not too many people drive through). We attempt to catch sparrows at different locations in a single marsh system; so far I've worked in Conneaut, Genevea, and South Hartstown. Don't get me wrong, each of these areas is huge! But enough backstory, let's get to what I've actually been doing. I've recorded the day's events along a rough timeline that starts on Friday morning. Enjoy!

Friday, June 19—Getting My Marsh Legs

5:30 AM-- I woke up and threw on the clothes I brought to wear in the swamp: jeans and a t-shirt that I was OK with never wearing again. After a quick cup of coffee, I threw on my windbreaker, pulled on my hip waders, and went to meet Steve, Rindy, and Casey at the car.

6:20 AM-- We arrived at our first site of the day, Geneva. Everyone applied liberal amounts of insect repellent, and we assembled our equipment:
- Mist nets and poles. Mist nets are large nets that, when assembled, look something like a thin black volleyball net. They must be put up and taken down every time you find a spot that is likely to yield a sparrow. When placed well, such as near a line of bushes, it is not obvious that it is there (hence the name).
- Boom box with a two-sided cassette tape. One side plays a female bird's distress call, and the other plays a male swamp sparrow's song.
- Banding kit
- Binoculars
- Notebook

Then, it was about a fifteen-minute walk to the edge of the marsh. There we split into teams: Rindy and Casey headed east, while Steve and I went west.

I'm not sure if you've ever walked through swamp before, but I'm going to assume that you haven't. It is not for the faint of heart! Let me paint you a mental picture: To navigate, one has to push through tangled grasses and cattails that often rise higher than one's head. The greatest danger in areas with thick vegetation is tripping in it-- as I soon discovered. Areas where the vegetation thins out a bit are (to me) more treacherous because it means that you can (and will) sink into the muddy water. Luckily we weren't anywhere that a person could get completely submerged! As you might imagine, it's quite a workout trudging through such a place, so it was lucky that it was cloudy; the sun wasn't beating down on us. The most annoying thing out there was the clouds of gnats that would congregate around us.

In short, it was wild, it was huge, it was smelly, it was dense-- in other words, pretty darn cool.

Once we were sufficiently far into the swamp, Steve began teaching me how one catches (or at least attempts to catch) swamp sparrows. First, we had to find a promising location, i.e., a swamp sparrow's territory, which is usually home to one pair (a male and his mate). If we just set up the net anywhere, and we weren't in a territory, then we probably wouldn't catch anything. To figure out whether or not you're in a territory, first, you listen. If you hear a male's song or a female's call, you're in a good area. Then, you take the boom box and play the female distress call. If you're in a territory, usually the sparrows will come to investigate, or at least make some more noise. If that doesn't work, flip the tape over and try playing the male song-- if you're in a territory, usually the male will rocket out upon hearing it to confront the "intruder." Once you've seen or heard a sparrow reacting to the tape, it's time to break out the mist net.

To set up a mist net, you need to create a "net lane" about 3 meters long and a meter wide that is relatively free of vegetation, which is done by taking steps that sweep out to the sides and tamping down the grass with your boots. Once I'd mastered this, it became my job whenever we'd staked out a location. While I created the net lane, Steve would set up the net, which consists of unfurling and hanging the net between two tall metal poles (one of the manifold reasons why thunderstorms do not bode well for field work). Once the net had been assembled, we put the boom box in a tussock near the middle of the net, turned on the distress call, and retreated a little way into the marsh. If all went well, a sparrow would fly over to see what was causing the ruckus, run into the net, and fall into a pocket in the material, awaiting our inspection. If we didn't catch anything in about ten minutes, we would usually disassemble the net and move on.

On our first attempt of the morning, we caught a sparrow fairly quickly and sloshed over to take a look. It turned out to be a male; not what we were looking for, but we banded it and recorded its band number and where we caught it so that the data could be sent to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Bands are made of colored plastic or metal and fit around a bird's leg like a bracelet. If a biologist catches a banded bird, they can record the band number and colors and learn from the US Fish and Wildlife Service database when and where it was banded and by whom.

After we'd caught the male, our luck took a turn for the worse, and even though we braved the "Straits of Praither" (a particularly treacherous patch of marsh where a man named Dan Praither once got stuck up to his neck in the mire), our efforts were unrewarded-- Geneva yielded no more sparrows. However, it did begin to drizzle, which at least got rid of the gnats. Accepting defeat, we regrouped with Casey and Rindy and headed back to the car to drive to another part of the marsh system.

8:30 AM-- We got to Conneaut Marsh, which surrounds a dirt road. This venture was easier because all four of us stuck together, and we didn't have to go very far off the road into the swamp. The swamp gods smiled upon us in Conneaut (HUZZAH!) and we caught three sparrows-- two females and a male. The male we banded and released, and the females we brought back to the lab. Once we'd housed and fed them, we debated our next move. We were feeling lucky and the day was young, so we decided to go back to Conneaut.

10:30 AM-- back in the swamp, we split up again, and this time we headed out much deeper. Almost three hours later, Steve and I hadn't caught any more females, although Casey and Rindy got two, so that was good. That isn't to say that my time out there wasn't exciting, though-- We saw a swamp sparrow nest, and I got stuck up to my knee in mud and had to be hauled out. I'm just glad that I avoided the dreaded face-plant into the muck, but when we decided to call it quits, I was definitely ready to leave.

1:30 PM-- I can honestly say that you can't fully appreciate how marvelous a shower can be until you've spent six hours in a swamp! So, what’s my take on field work? Well, if you're looking for a glamorous way to spend your time, it's not for you; at the end of the morning you are buggy, sweaty, tired, and feel thoroughly unattractive. However, if you enjoy the thrill of "the chase," going on adventures, and/or playing in the mud, then you'll have a good time. I definitely enjoyed it-- and, as Steve said, there's nothing like wading through a swamp to keep you in shape!

8:30 PM-- It's bedtime for the biologists in Pymatuning-- we'll be off at 6:00 AM tomorrow to do it all again, weather permitting. Four females down, four to go!