We have had the great fortune of hosting Dr. Peter Pap as a Fulbright Fellow. Peter and his partner Eszter Ruprecht and their lovely daughter Zsofi arrived from Romania on a very wintry night in January and have been here in Boulder at the University of Colorado until their departure this coming Sunday 15 July. We've had so much fun learning about Peter's work, continuing our collaboration on barn swallows, meeting his family, and getting to know more about the culture of Romania and Hungary.  Last night, we celebrated a great visit with Peter and his family over a meal of traditional Hungarian and Jewish dishes.

In other news, our fieldwork in Colorado is slowing down enough to get back to some writing projects! Most of the Colorado birds have fledged the nestlings from their first breeding attempts and are on to their second. Its been brutally hot but today brings some cooler weather and hopefully a bit of rain!

Becca

Sometimes its good to just stay at home. The great thing about working on barn swallows is that they are a common breeder throughout most of the northern hemisphere and we've got lots of breeding birds right here in Boulder County, Colorado. The Safran Lab team has been continuing their local long term studies, first initiated in the summer 2008, in several barns within Boulder county. Its been wonderful to have the opportunity to sit still and watch a field season unfold rather than travel from place to place to capture as many different birds as possible. The approach is more or less the same in terms of capturing, banding, and measuring individuals, but our local work provides the additional opportunity of following these individuals over the course of a breeding season and even between years. New postdoc, Dr. Angela Medina Garcia is adding RFID tags to most of our breeding individuals so that we can remotely track individual behaviors at a nest site. This will enable her to ask cool questions about social coordination in the face of predation across sites that vary in the number of breeding individuals. Check out more about Angela's cool work here.  New PhD student Molly McDermott is interested in year-round environmental influences on phenotype variation. We'll be placing several different kinds of tags on birds to track their seasonal migrations in order to better understand what environments they have experienced during migration and the locations in which they spend the winter. You can read more about Molly here.

We have a great team of undergrad researchers in the field with us this summer. Our work requires many hands and we're grateful to have such an enthusiastic team [pictured below from left to right: Hannah Dezara, Elena Deandrea, Liz Gallegos, Abby Marynowski, Katie Sanko.

Meanwhile, barn swallow and other swallow projects are being carried out by other Safran Lab alum, including Dr. Iris Levin, Agnes Scott College, Dr. Maren Vitousek, Cornell University, Dr. Joey Hubbard, Truman State University, Dr. Liz Scordato, Cal Poly Pomona.

25 May 2017
 
And now we have 11 tags in hand and two more that have been spotted! There is a chance that our collaborator Emilio, who worked with us in Lanzhou, will actually go back to Lanzhou to look for more tags. Based on our return rates here in Zhangye, we may have missed something in Lanzhou. There are other possible explanations as well. One is that the breeding season was just starting up when we arrived at our first sampling site. Many birds were not laying eggs yet – perhaps once they are tied to nests, we’ll be able to spot more tags. Or, perhaps there really are just lower returns to that small village outside of Lanzhou? Its very hard to tell. One thing that has been very interesting is that we’ve easily recaptured five birds that Liz Scordato and Liu Yu banded here in Zhangye in 2015! So, the birds do come back to the same nest areas in this part of the world – something we have seen many places elsewhere (e.g., all over North America, Israel, Europe). This is highly reassuring! And, the birds seem to be OK with the extra weight of the geolocator tags – which is also highly reassuring. When we remove the tags we take a series of measurements on each individual – they are in fine shape, nice and heavy and look healthy to us. Of course, the birds that didn’t return could really have suffered with the extra weight. We’ll take a look at last year’s data to see if we can predict anything about the birds that did or did not return with the tags. We are learning a lot!

​22 May, morning
 
The rains came in yesterday afternoon. We were able to fully survey about 80 different locations in another small village within the city in the morning. This village was less bustling than the other and some of the buildings seem as if they are crumbling into the ground. The outer layer of mud covering many of the walls is falling off, exposing the tidy rows of bricks beneath them. Many of the homes are abandoned. We talked to a man who remembered Sheela and invited us into his home. Inside, he had all of the conveniences of modern living in his 3-room apartment: a fridge, large flat screen television, a wood burning stove and nice furniture. He kindly offered us tea and invited us back to catch his swallows in the evening. He said that his village would not be torn down which is lucky for him and his family. He also told us that the economy was not good in the past year – the reason why so many of the homes around him were empty.

​21 May, morning
 
It looks like rain today. Luckily, our first day in the Zhangye was productive so if we are not able to catch birds today, we’ll still on be on schedule. Today, we’ll do the same as yesterday morning – walk through the smaller villages tucked inside the city and go door to door to see if there are swallows. We easily surveyed over 100 nests yesterday and identified about 20 breeding pairs of swallows in one morning. Then, after lunch, we captured about 7 birds in 2 hours before it started to rain. And yes! We recaptured a bird with one of our tags as well as several that Liz and Liu Yu had banded here in 2015! All in all, an excellent start to our time in Zhangye!