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: