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.
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.