Well, I’m currently sitting in the back seat of the car, typing on my laptop at our campsite along the highway, approximately halfway between Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk. We left Georgy’s place 8 days ago, his Toyota Carib packed to the gills with people and their stuff. Georgy is a researcher at the Institute of Systematics and Ecology of Animals in Novosibirsk who studies hybridization between two very cute bird subspecies, the white and masked wagtails (Motocilla alba alba and M. a. personata). Georgy has agreed to drive us something like 3000km, from Novosibirsk, to his place in Kamyshlov, on to Irkutsk (via a contact zone between the European and Siberian barn swallow subspecies), and hopefully to a contact zone between the Siberian and South Asian barn swallow subspecies on the other side of Lake Baikal. He has agreed to do this for free; following his own two month field season; and his wife, Yulia, has agreed to sacrifice her vacation time to come along, as well. Yeah! What amazing generosity!
And on top of this, they happen to be two of the most pleasant people I’ve ever met, and have been amazing travel companions/field collaborators over the past 8 days since we left their home in Krasnoyarsk. (Georgy picked us up in Novosibirsk and drove us the 800km to Krasnoyarsk back on the 15th.) A bit about Georgy, as I’ve come to know him. He has: the ability to identify any bird in Siberia from a few song notes; an impressive culinary ability over both stove and campfire; excellent English; a penchant for Scandinavian heavy metal (check out Finntroll if you’re curious); an endless repertoire of Russian jokes and aphorisms; and an incredible ability to stay positive and get things done. A bit about Yulia. She has: a great sense of humor; a love and gift for cooking dessert; a real aptitude for banding and measuring birds (though she’s a fertility researcher in real life); and has a pretty extraordinary dose of patience, for going along with our whole crazy plan!
Georgy and Yulia, making dinner in the apartment In any case, the intervening days have been spent driving the two-lane highway which is the only road connecting the two halves of Russia. Every so often, we stop to sample birds as we rumble down pot-holed, or rather (kettle-drum-holed) dirt roads servicing dozens of small villages. In each of these villages, we typically drive around, hanging our heads out the windows and calling out to Georgy when we see a barn swallow flying or singing on a TV antenna or telephone wire. Once we determine the likely home of a given swallow, Georgy or Yulia then attempt to negotiate the bird’s capture. This involves a range of interactions, ranging from, “Hey, can we come catch your swallows?” “Yeah, sure, you can take the nest, too, if you want,” to “Hey, we are biologists from Novosibirsk and the United States. We would like to catch the swallows which we have noticed flying around your barn. Might we come in for five to thirty minutes to catch them, so we can take some measurements and release them?” “No! Get the %#*@ outta here!”
European (left) and Siberian barn swallows The low point of the “hybrid transect” portion of our trip took place in a small village called Old Alzamai. This was the first place where we saw a lot of both subspecies living in the same place, including some intermediates which were likely hybrids. Georgy had secured permission to band a pair of pale H. r. rustica’s nesting in his back yard, and Georgy and I had spent about fifteen minutes trying to catch the pair, having encountered some technical difficulties. For starters, the little shed the pair were living in was tiny, allowing only a split second for the bird to come in, and me to shoot out from my hiding spot, blocking the door with the net, without snagging it on a number of random nails and wood slivers, dipping the net, or getting the pole jammed under a low truss. After doing several of those things in the “don’t do” column, we actually managed to catch the female, and were trying to bait the male in with a song playback, when a woman poked her head into the doorway. Although I couldn’t understand what she was asking, I witnessed a very clear transformation as Georgy explained that we were biologists studying swallows and that we were trying to catch her male bird to take a few measurements. Then followed about two full minutes in which she howled at both of us in a manner reminiscent of Finntroll, saying things that Georgy refused to translate or revisit later. During a short break in this tirade, the woman snatched the female from Georgy’s hand, which he was gently holding to demonstrate that everything was okay, and released the bird with a banshee cackle of triumph. We later heard her tongue lashing her husband from across the street for the next half hour. Her neighbor, who apparently didn’t find us to be abominable human beings, heard our story, and just shook her head, saying, “Oh yeah, she’s crazy.” (Three separate people in the village laid similar praise on our personal saboteur.)
Liz, I think you've been spotted ----July 2nd Update----
The two weeks since our last post have been extremely harrowing, and we have now successfully completed the transect across the subspecies contact zone. Apart from a few unfortunate cases like the one described above (for some reason several of our interesting sites with both barn swallow subspecies are owned by total jerks), we've been extremely successful. We found a few barns and dairies with loads of barn swallows in a few places to get our sample sizes up, and the rest we filled in with Georgy and Yulia's door-to-door salesmanship. We also found that there is a very steep transition from extremely pale Hirundo rustica rustica to the very rusty Hirundo rustica tytleri over a stretch of about 100km. We sampled very intensively across this area, and found that there were some intermediate-looking birds, which might be hybrids or backcrosses, but for the most part, the swallows seem to mate assortatively. This is not entirely surprising, as these two subspecies are over 1% divergent in their DNA sequences and have probably evolved in relative isolation over thousands of years. But this is also interesting because bird species which are diverged by even several millions of years can often produce fertile offspring. The fact that these closely related subspecies don't seem to hybridize much suggests that differences in the mating preferences which have shaped these populations in different directions seem to also be keeping these birds from hybridizing when they come into contact. It will be very interesting to see at the genetic level to what degree this holds up. If DNA sequence data shows very low levels of hybridization across our sampling transect, this could provide some of the strongest evidence in the scientific literature for the importance of sexual selection in the process of speciation. Very exciting stuff for we nerdly types!
3 cold, groggy scientists The two weeks since our last post have been extremely harrowing, and we have now successfully completed the transect across the subspecies contact zone. Apart from a few unfortunate cases like the one described above (for some reason several of our interesting sites with both barn swallow subspecies are owned by total jerks), we've been extremely successful. We found a few barns and dairies with loads of barn swallows in a few places to get our sample sizes up, and the rest we filled in with Georgy and Yulia's door-to-door salesmanship. We also found that there is a very steep transition from extremely pale Hirundo rustica rustica to the very rusty Hirundo rustica tytleri over a stretch of about 100km. We sampled very intensively across this area, and found that there were some intermediate-looking birds, which might be hybrids or backcrosses, but for the most part, the swallows seem to mate assortatively. This is not entirely surprising, as these two subspecies are over 1% divergent in their DNA sequences and have probably evolved in relative isolation over thousands of years. But this is also interesting because bird species which are diverged by even several millions of years can often produce fertile offspring. The fact that these closely related subspecies don't seem to hybridize much suggests that differences in the mating preferences which have shaped these populations in different directions seem to also be keeping these birds from hybridizing when they come into contact. It will be very interesting to see at the genetic level to what degree this holds up. If DNA sequence data shows very low levels of hybridization across our sampling transect, this could provide some of the strongest evidence in the scientific literature for the importance of sexual selection in the process of speciation. Very exciting stuff for we nerdly types!
So, now, we have used up all 300 of the bird bands that the Russian birding association gave us (they refused to give us more, as it would be impossible for us to catch that many!) We have now resorted to marking the birds with symbols on their tail feathers to denote birds we've already caught and can look forward to doing this across another thousand miles of Siberia. This is a biiiig country! For now, we will spend a couple days getting clean, relaxing a bit, and checking out the deepest body of freshwater in the world: Lake Baikal. Baikal is also home to the world's only freshwater seal, a large number of endemic fish species, freshwater sponges, and giant amphipods the size of your thumb, which are like shrimp but are usually barely visible to the naked eye. So look for photos soon. After that, we will again head along an easterly transect, hoping to sample along the transition from two different barn swallow subspecies: Hirundo rustica tytleri and H. r. gutturalis. More on that to come!
Cheerio,
Matt
Cheerio,
Matt