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farewell to Peter Pap and family

7/12/2018

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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

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Summer 2018!

6/29/2018

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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.
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Good luck in Jiuquan!

5/30/2017

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PictureDownloading data from tag 14
​May 28 - 29
 
Yesterday, we traveled by high speed train to another city within the Gansu Province – our last stop along the Hexi Corridor where tags were placed on birds last summer. Without saying too much, Juiquan was a tricky place last year. Sheela ended up placing ten tags on birds in a small group of buildings deep within the city. To ensure maximal success we registered ourselves with the local police and the Forestry Service in the city – to make sure they knew what our doings would be for the next 48 hours. We’re heading to a highly-populated part of the city where we want to be sure that we are a known entity. Everyone was fine with our work so we headed out to the site. Liu Yu and Liz had caught birds there in 2015, Sheela and her crew were there last summer. People immediately recognized us as they chatted with Liu Yu. One of the few words in Chinese that I can recognize during these discussions is the word for barn swallow which sounds like ‘yentzah’.  When they say this, I nod and smile and point to my binoculars.  Really, we are just a bunch of nerdy scientists but we of course have to convince others that creeping around the entry of their homes quietly with headlamps and our banding gear is fine.


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Last day in Zhangye

5/27/2017

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PictureSecret ops in Zhangye
​27 May mid-day
 
The past few days in Zhangye were long and a bit frustrating. We had seen one more tag on a bird in village 3 and had gently coaxed the old woman living there to try to catch that bird. She really didn’t want us around but a neighbor of hers – whose birds we banded the day before – helped negotiate our entry. Once inside, she warmed up to Liu Yu and even served him lunch while Sheela and I sat outside on the dusty sidewalk eating dried peanuts.  We were fine with that – any way to make her happy made us happy! That bird was wily, however, and despite several well-planned attempts, we just couldn’t catch him. Our last try involved us sitting in the woman’s yard with our nets folded up, ready to run up and catch the bird when he came in to roost. The old woman did not want us around at night so we first showed up at 11 am where our attempts were a complete failure.


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A day off, a night on!

5/25/2017

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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!


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Inside and outside of Zhangye: kids, candy, chaos!

5/24/2017

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PictureAerial view of Zhangye
​24 May 2017, 8 am
 
We are getting ready to head out for another long day! Yesterday ended well, with another tag in our hand. There is a story there that includes many heavy breathing onlookers, cigarette smoke, motorcycle alarms and other chaos, but let’s just keep it simple: we got the bird!
 
But there were a few bumps in the road yesterday as well. Turns out there were tags placed on eleven birds in village 3, not four… so we had to backtrack a bit over there and sort out the situation. Luckily, most people are very tolerant of us and have welcomed us to their homes to set up our nets.  We did locate two additional tags but one of them is on a pair that is nesting in a house that is locked for most of the day except for a few minutes in the morning, the evening and a break for lunch. This means our time will be tight and less than ideal for catching this bird. Another tag was found on a bird that is nesting in a house where the owner really doesn’t want us around. One of her neighbors helped negotiate our entry yesterday but despite a fairly detailed set of attempts on our part, no luck! That pair is not really settled in a nest yet – so they are just hard to catch! We will head back there this morning – we have a time set up to meet with the owners who are only home for a few bits of time during the day and we’ll see if we can find that other tagged bird – hopefully he has moved to another location that is happy to have us!


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Two more tags in sight!

5/23/2017

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PictureSix tags in hand!
23 May 2017
 
Well, yesterday was a long but excellent one! We revisited some nests in Zhangye village 1 just to check on some places where Sheela had placed tags last year. We caught a few birds and saw a tagged bird that we’ll try to catch later tonight! We then spent the afternoon in a small village outside of the city (Zhangye Village 3) where Sheela placed 4 tags last year. We hit the jackpot here! We caught a few pairs and relocated and caught 2 more tags here! We had to work quite hard on the last male – we weren’t sure where his nest was and he was not going for our usual tricks. We left village 3 around 7 pm and returned around 9 pm. The door to location where we last saw him was locked so we felt defeated… but THEN… the owner opened up the gate for us and THERE WAS OUR MALE! We had him in hand in less than 5 minutes, collected all of the data we needed, removed his tag and ran back to the taxi that was waiting for us and headed back to town. We wondered what the driver thought we were up to! When he dropped us off, it was dark, we had on our headlamps, were carrying all of our gear and poles and had asked him to wait for up to an hour (which he was fine to do). We celebrated our success over peanuts and some of the local spirits.


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Sitting out the rain with a sleeping Buddha and Cheng Bang coffee

5/22/2017

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PictureLiu Yu and latte
​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.


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In the hybrid zone - Zhangye field work

5/21/2017

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PictureBarn swallow on nest in Zhangye
​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!


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Zhangye, China: the center of the Hexi Corridor

5/20/2017

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PictureDrum tower in Zhangye
​20 May 2017
 
We said goodbye to our friends in Sitancun and headed west to Zhangye by high speed train. This was a very smooth and comfortable trip, from start to finish. The train station itself is a model of efficiency on many levels: information on departures and arrivals is clearly indicated, the escalators don’t start moving until they need to, there is hot water available for tea everywhere you go – free of charge and one can dine on a huge bag of vegetable steamed buns for less than $1.


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