A Year in Review - What Worked & What To Change Next Year

We’re coming up on the end of the year and the beginning of the year-in-reflection season in blogs across the internet. In the spirit of this, and because I’m currently on a plane with some time to fill, here is a quick overview of my whirlwind of a year, specifically focused on the results thus-far of research project. Some of this information may be helpful for other field ornithologists.

Total blood samples from SF birds – 78

Birds by location:

            Eastshore State Park - 2

Golden Gate Park – 27

Lake Merced – 28

            Lobos Dunes – 5

            McLaren Park – 6

            San Francisco State University – 3

San Francisco Zoo – 7

Total number of birds infected – 7

Infected birds by location*:

            Eastshore State Park – 2

            Golden Gate Park – 2

            Lake Merced – 1

            Lobos Dunes – 1

            San Francisco Zoo – 1

Total usable** audio recordings – 37

Recordings by location:

            Golden Gate Park – 19

            Lake Merced – 13

            McLaren Park – 2

            San Francisco State University – 2

            San Francisco Zoo – 1

Things That Worked – Field

• Target netting white-crowned sparrows is easy – they respond well to playbacks and for the most part can be caught in less than 5 minutes
• Only one net that is needed at a time – more than that gets too difficult to manage because more than likely, by the time I had a second net up I had caught a bird in the first one
• Customized data sheets – data sheets tailored to my project kept me on task and thorough with a bird in the hand
• A backpack vs. an over-the-shoulder bag – having my hands free and weight equally distributed is fantastic
• A well-organized banding/bleeding kit – a place for everything and everything in its place – makes setting up and breaking down so much easier
• Labeling GPS points of banded birds with their color code – this helped when I returned to record audio – I knew which color combinations to look for in which area
• Immediate changing of audio files with the bird’s color combination – it was a pain to cycle through the whole alphabet on the simple interface of the recorder but was worth it when sorting the songs on the computer later on – a pro for the recorder though was that it logged the date and time of each recording

Things That Worked – Lab

• Having a well-organized and detailed lab book – this is a must! Even though it gets tedious to write the same ingredient list for PCR over and over it is so important in case something goes wrong (or right!) and can be referenced in detail at a later date
• Concise but clear labeling – there is very little room on strip tubes so having a short alias for a sample is essential
• Lab aliases and samples are organized in a table in my lab notebook
• Labeling each strip tube, even though they’re attached, is important in case my mind wanders while pipetting (it inevitably does)
• Testing protocol with 6 samples at first then scaling up – there are 8 tubes on one strip – this makes room for one positive control, one negative control, and 6 samples – once I ran the whole nested PCR cycle and gel through and proved the protocol works, then scale up 
• Setting aside time for lab work and breaking step up between days – it always took longer than I thought and I would be worn OUT after a long day in our window-less lab – running the nested PCR one day and then the gel the next helped 
• Having great lab mates willing to share skills and bounce ideas off! Dave, Brad, Allison, and Brett were such a great help this year

Modifications for the 2015 Field Season

• *Incorporate more field sites, emphasize those that worked, and phase out ones that didn’t
• When I initially began this project Golden Gate Park, Lake Merced, and McLaren Park were priority sites. Eastshore State Park, the San Fran Francisco Zoo, and SFSU were added on opportunistically – these ended up being fantastic sites and had infected birds! This year I’ll place a greater emphasis on this area 
• McLaren Park was tough to work in – the ground was hard, there weren’t many great netting locations and there were many off-leash dogs – I may come here to augment my sample size if it’s low but it will be a lower priority this year
• Take many more notes during audio recording – It would be great to have a field assistant or a bribed friend for this. One person will record audio while the other takes notes on the bird’s behavior/current environmental conditions. 
• **Many birds had compact, high-density territories and some of the audio recordings had to be thrown out because it was impossible to tell which singing bird was the target bird.
• Some birds flew to alternate perches during the recording – it was difficult to distinguish between a background bird and one that had simply flown further away 
• A 6-meter net! Our lab has many 12m nets but you really don’t realize how long they are until you’re trying to stretch one out in a small pathway between two shrubs in Golden Gate Park – part of the budget for my crowdfunding campaign will go towards the purchase of a couple 6m nets and lightweight poles

Birds!

So this post isn’t left without pictures:

I visited the San Francisco Zoo the other day to try seed trapping white-crowned sparrows. Since it was warm this summer we thought maybe there would be an increase in infection prevalence but it’s difficult to target net outside the breeding season because the birds aren’t territorial. I was told it’s best to pre-bait the area to get the birds used to coming to that particular spot. Even better is to pre-bait and leave the trap out to get them acclimated. Unfortunately my field sites are in public parks so leaving the trap out is impossible.

However, the site at the Zoo is in a back area that is not accessible to the general public. I didn’t pre-bait the site but I was able to leave the trap unattended so the birds could explore. I’ve never tried trapping before so I also brought along a net just in case. The trap ended up being a bust but I did catch two hatch-year white-crowned sparrows with target netting. They’re likely the offspring of a bird (or birds) I caught earlier this spring!

I wasn’t able to determine their sex but if they’re still around in the spring I might recapture them in breeding condition. So without further ado, let me introduce two new study birds: