The difference between Ya Ha Tinda and Canmore could not be greater. The ranch is isolated, wild, and far away. Canmore is a stop along the TransCanada highway just before Banff and we could feel the tourist effect immediately. Of course, its wonderful to get humans to see these amazing parts of the world and they need to be able to stay somewhere. For some reason, that some where just felt like it could be anywhere. Canmore felt like a fake western outpost built yesterday to please the crowds. Again, I think we were just experiencing the shock of the contrast from our day before but so be it. We had arrived very early this morning (after midnight) and woke up feeling a bit disoriented. I took a long walk in between hotels and strip malls looking for birds - any birds. Our search broadened to a nordic center on the outskirts of town, a dump and smaller neighboring towns. Nothing. No birds in sight though we did see a few old nests here and there (a favorite was found in an abandoned building turned skater park). 

We decided that we should backtrack a bit east and go to a known quantity site and that is just what we did the next morning. 

​Becca

While in Canmore during our downtime I wanted to reflect on our trip up to Ya Ha Tinda and the various methods I’ve learned on this trip handling barn swallows. I scrolled through my favorite pictures on this trip and decided to illustrate them. On our way back from Ya Ha Tinda there was also a female elk with a derpy look on her face looking directly at us with a radio collar and two tags sticking out of her ears. I took a picture of Becca gently handling a barn swallow, taking it out of the mist net in Tulip's barn. Her hands delicately held the bird, freeing its tail feathers from the light net. Holding the bird with the peace sign, cradling it in one hand to clearly see the wing feathers. The hilarious method of literally dropping the bird into a tube to measure its mass. And for a bonus, I wanted to look at other barn swallow poses and illustrate them to better understand their anatomy and overall appearance. 

​Salomé 

23 May 2024. The weather has been cold and rainy since crossing the border. We've seen a few barn swallows here and there but they are few and far between though not for lack of looking. We had planned on visiting Ya Ha Tinda ranch today (more on that soon) but heard it was snowing up there so headed up to Bear Valley Horse Rescue instead. 

I was skeptical on the ride out because the area was very wooded but once we pulled into the farmstead there were small barns and horses galore in a beautiful hilly setting. The folks were incredibly friendly, Kathy and her crew showed us around and introduced us to a barn where they had swallows the summer before. Inside this barn, too, was the beautiful Tulip. About an 800 lb (or more!) gorgeous hog laying in the hay. She had the run of the place - lovely straw beds, a few places to roam both inside and out. And its clear that she is loved and well cared for. You learn a lot about the people who own these barns when you see animals like this. This hog is in… well, hog heaven. 

Also inside Tulip’s barn were about four swallows and an active nest with two eggs! Bingo! I thought we could set up a net, have the birds in our hands in minutes and be out of there. But no. It would take several different net set ups, a rain storm to pass through. Then another rain storm. Then one bird in the net! And then, finally, two more. Our permit allows us to catch 80% of the birds at a site so to catch 3 out of the 5 or so that we saw was about right. Plus, it was clearly going to start raining again as we released the last bird so we packed it up and headed back to Sundre to catch a wifi signal, regroup and make (yet another) plan.

Expedition style fieldwork is just like this. Ups and downs. You can’t control the weather and because we work so closely with humans on their private land, we are really in their hands. So, we have to be patient and nimble. My job often feels like keeping everyone’s spirits up while continuously re-inventing yet another plan. While I am used to this, it does cause some stress: I want the students along for the ride to have a great experience. I want them to start getting trained up so that they feel even more useful and even move towards independence when it comes to handling birds. I know this will all take time. So, again, patience is key but this is something I have to work very hard at. 
A better day than we thought!

​Becca

We left Boulder, Colorado a bit past 8 am on the 20th and made it across the border through the Wild Horse Port of Entry this afternoon. The past two days have been surreal - an incredible variety of scenery and weather and great music to accompany the landscape. So much popcorn!

Our first overnight stop was in Billings, Montana after 8 or so hours of driving through northern Colorado into Wyoming and finally reaching Montana. This is big sky country. No, wait: HUGE sky country. Here, the high plains are flanked by all sorts of geologic wonders. Yellowstone lay temptingly just to the west of our route but we are on a mission so we pressed on. We hit a rain storm we could see from miles away while passing through Havre Montana on our way into Canada. The clouds somehow amplified the stark open landscape dotted by smaller ranches and homesteads as we drove through the last outposts of the Montana.  Our conversation with the border patrol at Wild Horse may have been a first as we explained that the only thing we were leaving in Canada after our three week stay would be small Canadian government issued metal bands placed on the tiny legs of barn swallows. I am sure the border patrol has seen it all but they were glad we had all of our permits on hand to explain the situation. 

We arrived in a small farm in Drumheller, Alberta around 7 pm. Apparently, this region is somewhat of a fossil capital of the world. The landscape features farmland as far as the eye can see. If you look carefully, there are canyons tucked into these lopsided green vistas, rich with fossils from the Cretaceous! We passed by Horseshoe Canyon on our way to visit a potential banding site. Our host Beth-Ann drove us around to a neighboring farm where we saw barn swallows flitting around the edge of a nesting site. Even though we had seen hundreds of barn swallows en route from Colorado to the border, things were quieter as we headed north. Spring seemed a bit slower to arrive here. 

We are heading to the University of Alberta's Rangeland Research Institute first thing in the morning and then sampling barn swallows as we head west to pick up postdoc Dr. Gina Calbrese at the airport in  Calgary tomorrow evening. 

After years of no international field work (COVID!), we are back on the road this summer to sample across the western Canadian Rockies! Check here often for updates as we go! 

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.