Scoping Out Field Sites

Before I go on with more of the background information I thought I'd include an update on what I've been actually doing with this project so far.

I began my graduate work in August of last year (2013) and for the first semester I was pretty much exclusively reading background literature trying to figure out what exactly I wanted to study. I came in knowing quite a bit about birds but not so much on the parasite side of things.

I finally settled onto the effects of these parasites on song for a couple reasons: I wanted to study the bird side of things rather than the microbiology of parasites; I've done some work with bioacoustics (biology + acoustics) in the past; Song is important for reproduction and thus this project is conservation related, which is the field I am ultimately interested in going into.

My project breaks down into several phases:

• First I'm going out and catching the birds: 

• To catch the birds I'm going to do something called target mist netting. Mist nets are fine mesh nets that are difficult for birds to see so they fly in and get tangled up. For target netting I'll place a speaker below the nets and play a male's song. Nearby males will get agitated that there is another "male" in their territory and fly over to the source of the sound and into the net. Removal from the net is quick and easy and the birds get placed into little cloth bags to reduce stress. (See pictures above - me taking a bird out of a mist net and the cloth bags I made from thrift store moody dinosaur bed sheets)

• Then I'll "process" the birds. This includes taking basic measurements such as wing length, weight, etc. I'll also take a small blood sample so I can determine if the bird is infected or not. Additionally, each bird will get a unique combination of colored leg bands. This is so that when I return to the same sites later, I'll be able to look through my binoculars to see the colors instead of catching the birds again. 

• The next phase is audio recording and analysis
• Ravinder helped me purchase professional audio equipment (more on this later) and I will return to the same sites, find the color banded birds, and record them singing. 
• I'll then digitize the audio clips and use the program, Raven (more on this later too) to measure aspects such song length, frequency, loudness, etc. with the ultimate goal of determining if there are differences between the songs of infected and uninfected birds. 

That's the project plan in a nutshell. I'll keep everyone posted as I go through the phases.

Current Work

Right now I am scoping out field sites in the parks of San Francisco. There is a pretty hefty permitting process you need to go through if you want to work with vertebrate animals in the wild. I need a federal, state, and city permit as well as "Animal Subject Protocol Approval" form my school.

The San Francisco Department of Recreation and Parks has requested that I provide GPS locations of proposed mist net locations. Here's one of the maps I created for Golden Gate Park:

Stars are good mist net locations (away from people and near a singing bird); open circles and pins are where I heard or saw a bird, respectively, but that would be lower priority net sites. 

Also, there are bison in Golden Gate Park:

Background - Avian Malaria

As I mentioned in the last post my project will investigate the effects of avian malaria on the song of male white-crowned sparrows. There's a couple different aspects to this project and I'll break it out over a few posts:

• Avian Malaria - what is it? How is it spread? What does it do to birds? 
• Bird Song - why do birds sing? What are the effects of parasites on song? 
• White-crowned Sparrows - what are they like? What does their song sound like? Why did I choose this species?
• My Project - what specifically am I going to be doing? What do I expect to find?

Avian Malaria

Avian malaria is similar to human malaria in that it is caused by a protozoan in the genus Plasmodium that is transmitted by mosquitoes. But while human malaria is caused by a handful of Plasmodium species, there are hundreds of species infecting birds. Infections have been documented on every continent except Antarctica.

Upon initial exposure, birds go through an acute phase of infection marked by low energy and high immune system activity. Most species survive this stage but maintain a low-level chronic infection for the rest of their lives. This is both good and bad: good because the birds don't die but bad because they are now perpetually infectious to mosquitoes, continuing the cycle of avian malaria.

Some documented effects include reductions in egg laying, migration ability, and body condition. The most dramatic effects, however, have been on the Hawaiian Islands and with penguins at zoos - in both cases there was widespread mortality.

The picture on the left shows bird blood cells infected with avian malaria. Bird blood cells differ from ours in that they have nuclei. The dark purple ovals are the nuclei and the granulated blotches (highly technical terms here...) are the parasites.
Source: Valkiunas, G. (2005) Avian Malaria Parasites and Other Haemosporidia. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL

Welcome!

Hi all!

I started this blog to keep everyone informed and involved with the work I'm doing in graduate school. While mainly geared towards friends and family, I hope that others will also find this work relevant and interesting.


Project Overview & Meet the Team
I am currently in graduate school at San Francisco State University. Specifically, I am an Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology major in the Lab of Avian Parasitology within the Department of Biology. My advisor is Dr. Ravinder Sehgal, who is not only an extremely knowledgable and connected researcher but also happened to work with my undergraduate ornithology professor from UCLA, Dr. Tom Smith. Small world!

In general my lab focuses on the blood parasites of birds, mainly avian (bird) malaria . This encompasses many topics ranging from DNA sequencing to large-scale effects of deforestation. For my project, I'll be studying the effects of avian malaria on bird song, specifically in a common bird called the white-crowned sparrow.

Here's me with a white-crown:

I'll go into the details of my project in a following blog post but first I want to introduce the other members of my lab:

From left to right:
- Brett, studying how avian malaria parasites bind to bird blood cells
- Me
- Allison, studying avian malaria's effects on migration in thrushes
- Ravinder, runs the lab!
- Brad, studying genes and related products of avian malaria
- Elvin, studying the patterns of how birds and their parasites diversify together
- Dave, studying the community of parasites present in local songbirds



One last note is that I've added a donation button on the right sidebar. Graduate school and the associated field and laboratory work can get expensive. Any contributions would help me immensely in my academic pursuit and would obviously be incredibly appreciated.





With that concluding note, welcome to my blog!