Duke University | Howard Hughes Undergraduate Program

Hello, members of the scientific community and assorted groupies. First off-- happy news! One of "my" birds laid an egg and lived to tell the tale! (Captive birds sometimes don't do so well with egg laying). But more importantly, his is the blog post where I finally explain what I'm doing in the lab this summer. Enjoy.

Some bits of info that will be useful in cutting through the bird jargon:

• Plastic song is highly variable, "messy" song that males sing when they first become sexually mature and begin singing. Crystallized song follows plastic song and, as its name implies, is more consistent and "cleaner." Think of plastic song as your handwriting when you were first learning to write, and crystallized song as your handwriting now-- it varies a bit, but you've "crystallized" your style.

My Question: When swamp sparrows mate, the female can both see the male and hear his song before she mates with him-- so she can assess him on both a visual (physical appearance) and auditory level (his song). Can female swamp sparrows make a judgement on the age of a male based solely on his song? Possible follow-up: Are there certain features/characteristics of the song that change over the years?

Hypothesis:  I hypothesize that females would prefer to mate with an older male, because surviving to an older age usually correlates with desirable characteristics (fitness, holding a territory, reproductive success, etc.). So, I predict that the females will show a preference for the song of an older male over a younger one.

Methods: To test this hypothesis, we will present eight hand-reared female swamp sparrows with plastic song, year-one crystallized song, and year-three crystallized song. These songs have been taken from recordings of four hand-reared male swamp sparrows, taken from the same population as the females. From each of the four males, six songs are selected: the plastic, year-one crystallized and year-three crystallized versions of two of their distinct song types.

The eight females have been given estradiol implants so that they all have relatively the same levels of estradiol and so that they are primed to respond to male song.

The eight females will be placed in operant chambers that contain two perches which are wired to play a song when hopped on. The females have been taught, through operant conditioning, to associate hopping on the perches with hearing a male’s song, which is a sufficient incentive for them. The perches are connected to a computer which records the number of hops on each perch that the bird makes.

For the first two days that the birds are placed in the chambers, the perches will be wired to silence. This is to see if the birds have a side preference for one perch or the other, which we will have to take into account when looking at the results of the experiment. For the next two days, the perches will both play the same song (not one of the songs that will be used in the experiment, but a recording of a male from the same population). Again, this is to help determine if a side preference exists. Finally, the females will be given a choice of song versus silence for four days to establish that they do, in fact, show a preference for song and are not just hopping randomly. After these eight days of preliminary data collecting, the experimental trials will begin.

For four days, four of the females will be given the choice of plastic versus year-one song, while the other four will be given the choice of year-one versus year-three song. After these four days, we will switch the stimuli sets (meaning that all eight females will have been given plastic versus first-year and first-year versus third year over the eight-day trial period). Within the four-day blocks, the side from which each stimulus is presented will also change. For example, one of the females hearing plastic vs. year-one song for the first four days will be given plastic song on the right for two days and then plastic song on the left for two days, again to help reduce the effects of a side preference and to increase variation.

The songs presented to each female are randomized so that no female hears the same song type twice and that each female is given a unique combination of songs. However, the songs that a female is presented with on a given day are the same song type from the same male (so for example, a female might hear the plastic and year one versions of song type A from male 1).

****************************************************

Hopefully, the data will provide me with some answers!
 

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!
 

Saturday, June 20-- Day of Disappointments

As you can probably infer from my less-than-cheery header, Saturday was a frustrating day in the field. We woke up to thunderstorms, which, as I've mentioned before, make going out into the field difficult (tall metal poles + lightning = a no-no). So, instead of immediately going out into the field, we stopped by the lab first to plan. There came the first disappointment of the day: We decided that one of the four females we had caught on Friday was not, in fact, a swamp sparrow. Swamp sparrows have stripey chests when they're fledglings, but adults usually don't; however, this female did have some stripes, though all other signs showed that she was a fully mature female (for example, she had a brood patch, which is an area on the underbelly that loses its feathers so the female can transfer heat to her eggs). We brought her in on Friday because we thought it might just be a fluke, and because we couldn't think of any other native species that it could possibly be. However, after some long deliberation and multiple consults, it was decided that it was probably a Lincoln Sparrow, which isn't native to the area but could possibly end up there (the odds are long, but we didn't want to risk bringing home a bird that's not actually a swamp sparrow). So, that meant that our female count was down to three out of eight.

The rain quieted down a bit around eight-thirty, so we headed out, determined to catch some more females. However, that part didn't go according to plan, either. We headed to South Hartstown, confident in our bird-catching abilities. It was there that I came face-to-face with field work's greatest foe: bad weather. It complicated our attempt on several fronts: For one thing, if we heard a thunderstorm approaching, we had to get out of the marsh as quickly as possible, take refuge in the car, and wait it out. For another, the low pressure and general storminess affects the birds, making them less active (and thus less likely to come out). So, it was very difficult to find responsive birds. When we eventually did find a responsive pair, I experienced one of the most frustrating occurrences in bird-catching: the Bounce. Duhn duhn duhhhhhhhhhhn. What is a bounce, you ask? Well, it’s exactly what it sounds like: a bird flies into the net, but instead of falling into a pocket, it “bounces” off and flies away. These bounces are sometimes just bad luck, but with wind blowing the net tauter, and rain making the pockets stick together, they occur much more often. Which is why we experienced not one, but four bounces in one morning. Learning that Rindy and Casey had no better luck did not improve our spirits.
 

However, if you ignore the lack of captured females, it wasn’t a bad day—I learned a lot. For example, I learned the difference between a swamp and a marsh, which I’ve been using interchangeably—a swamp is in a forested area, a marsh is more like a plain—and so it turns out that swamp sparrows were misnamed, because it turns out that they’re mostly found in marshes. And we located a few territories, even if we didn’t catch the birds, which is useful information to have. I also became quite good at finding “solid” ground in the marsh, which might be the difference between life and death in the future, who knows? But most importantly, I suppose, I learned that you can’t get too complacent when you’re out in the field; no matter how practiced you are, it really just depends on luck.

As a side note, we also visited the area’s most interesting public feature—surprisingly, it is one of the most visited tourist sites in Pennsylvania, second only to the Liberty Bell (you will understand exactly why this is surprising in a minute). It is the Linesville Spillway, a holding tank for the carp that the Fish and Game people in PA stock the lakes with. People go and throw white bread to the fish, which over the years has created an incredible population boom—the area literally writhes with carp. Frankly, it’s disgusting, but fascinating. The catchphrase of the Spillway is that it’s where “the ducks walk on the fish--” and though I didn’t see that while I was there, they certainly could if they wanted to.

Sunday, June 21-- Leaving on a High Note

My flight was scheduled to leave at 1:40 on Sunday, and it was a two-hour drive from the research station to the airport, but I really wanted to catch another female before I left! So, we went out one last time. First, we went back to South Hartstown to try and get the responsive pair from yesterday, but no go. So, we headed to Conneaut to make our final attempt. And lo and behold! Within forty minutes of trying, we caught a female! I nearly fell in the ooze in my haste to get over and take a look. Victory was ours! I could return home feeling triumphant.

On the way to the airport, we learned that Rindy and Casey had caught another female—five out of eight! The flight back home was as smooth as could be, and I arrived in time to celebrate Fathers’ Day. All in all, I’d say my time in the marsh was a smashing success

Epilogue

Monday, June 22
 

Back at Duke, I came in to the lab today to learn that Rindy and Casey had caught all of the rest of the birds they needed and are coming back! So, mission accomplished, folks. The females will live at Duke for a year, and then they’ll be returned to the marsh. Thanks to Steve for chauffeuring me around, showing me the ropes (or nets, har har), and teaching me tons about all things avian; Rindy and Casey for bringing the Bullocks’ and their iPhones; and Irene for letting me stay with her!
 

Hello again, my faithful blog readers! I hope the two or three of you are doing well. I’ve had a great week, not least because I have my project planned out. But, according the blog schedule, that’s next week’s post, and who am I to go against the schedule? So I’ll stick to the script, if you will, and save the details of my project for next week.
 

You might be wondering what on earth the title of this post refers to. If you knew that it was from “Cinderella,” you win bonus points, but even knowing that, it may not be clear what “Cinderella” has to do with my work in the lab. Well, you might remember that at that point in the movie, Cinderella is singing to her bird friends, who for some unexplained reason understand English. This past week, I’ve felt a lot like Cinderella, learning to interpret the sparrows’ body language and vocalizations, discovering the birds’ different personalities—in effect, learning to communicate with them (or at least letting them communicate with me).
 

Which brings me to the official topic of this post: my expectations for my summer research. Well, obviously my greatest expectation is to be able to talk to birds. Though I’m partially joking (I doubt I will literally become able to hold a conversation with them, as cool as that would be), I do look forward to learning to interpret their responses in the experiments I’m setting up. Running these experiments is sort of like a survey, asking them what their preferences are (more details later!) and so in a way, they will be “talking” to me.

I also anticipate learning a lot about the various protocols that go along with using animals in research. As I’ve already seen, when researchers use animals, they must pass many, many different types of inspections. Last week, the washing machines that we use to clean dishes and cages were inspected to make sure the water reached a certain temperature to ensure cleanliness. Not to mention the frequent inspections of the animals themselves and their living quarters.

Finally, one of the things I’m most excited about is learning about is field work. Tomorrow, I’ll hop on a plane to Pymatuning, Pennsylvania to experience firsthand how the birds we use in our research are obtained, and to check out some of the experiments that are being done in the field. I’ll be writing a special “field work” post when I get back on Sunday, so I won’t go into too much detail here, but I will tell you that hip waders will be involved—get excited.

Speaking of field work, I should probably pack for that. I guess that’s all for now, then. Until next time!
 

Hello, all! My name is Molly Grace, and to participate in the Howard Hughes program, I've travelled all the way from Durham, NC. But although home is less than 30 minutes away for me, a week in the lab has proved that this experience will be a world away from anything I've ever done before.

I've taken up residence in the Nowicki Lab, which studies (to put it very broadly) animal communication, currently using swamp sparrows (Melospiza georgiana) and, very recently, a species of jumping spider. While in this lab, I will be under the guidance of my awesome mentors: Steve Nowicki (PI), Susan Peters, and Rindy Anderson. At this point in time, my project hasn't been completely nailed down, but it will utilize female sparrows in a behavioral experiment recording their reaction to males' songs. More specifics on that in a later post.

Much of my time this week has been spent discussing possible projects, making mechanical preparations for my project (hormone implants, setting up the operant chambers I'll be using), and, of course, learning how to care for the birds we use.

To learn more about the glory that is the Nowicki Lab, go to http://www.biology.duke.edu/nowicki/.

I'll leave you with some pictures of the lab:

Here I am with one of the females who will be participating in my project. A couple of side notes: 1) No birds will be harmed in the making of this research experience (thank goodness), and 2) To all you kids out there planning to go into behavioral research and subsequently blog about it, be sure to get your PI's OK before you post pictures of their animals!

 This is my "home base" where I'm currently analyzing some old data and males' songs that will hopefully be useful to my project.

COMING SOON: Romp in the Swamp-- My Foray into Field Work