Introducing the Official 2018 Field Season Blog

Greetings, all! Welcome to Round Two of "Emily goes running off into the woods to study animals". This is a pretty straightforward introduction, doubling as a test drive to remind me how to use this website effectively.

As most people will know, I've spent the last few months working on some research from school (and otherwise doing part-time work) while looking for my first "real" job post-graduation. The school research--a cleaned up and hopefully-publication-worthy redo of my senior research on elephant ecology--has gone well, and I expect to be 99% finished with it by the time I start this next endeavor. My other major activities, such as working part-time at Barnes & Noble and volunteering at my local nature center, will have to stop for now, much as I'll miss the people there.

Now, though, I'm preparing to depart for California in mid-March, as I've accepted a position as a field assistant for acorn woodpecker research at Hastings Natural History Reservation.

A "clown-faced" acorn woodpecker, courtesy of https://tinyurl.com/y84y5eqt

This silly-looking birds have some very weird social dynamics. Family groups consist of four-ish males (often brothers) and four-ish females (often sisters), all of which breed freely with each other. They're also accompanied by a bunch of young birds ("nest helpers") who haven't found their own family yet and so are stuck at home babysitting the new kids.

This results in what I have taken to calling "woodpecker Game of Thrones".

Since the local woodpeckers are very territorial and have snapped up the good nesting and feeding areas nearby, the only time a nest helper can start their own family is when all of the males or all of the females from another group die. Now, this does happen occasionally--and when it does, it sets off what is called a "power struggle" (I swear I'm not making this up, real scientific term there). All of the local lads or gals who want to get away from their parents get into a huge ruckus fighting over the new open positions, after which the victors emerge as the leaders of the new "dynasty" (again, technical term). Film adaptations are just waiting to be made.

On the scientific side, you might be able to guess how many weird things we therefore have available to study, mostly about group dynamics. Do the nest helpers get anything out of helping, or are they just pressed into service because they have nowhere else to go? Do they actually do their best to help, or just kind of make a show of it? How closely do the dominant birds watch them, anyway?

This particular park's worth of woodpeckers has been very well-studied: all of the birds in the area are banded, many are radio-tagged, and some are genotyped. In some form or another, this group has been constantly monitored for the last few decades. This is a ton of data, all about the Hastings woodpecker population.

Speaking of which, about Hastings. Hastings Natural History Reservation (http://hastingsreserve.org/) is a good-size nature reserve about two hours south of the Bay Area.

Generally in the middle of nowhere, but a very pretty nowhere.

It's pretty isolated, but not so much that you can't make weekend trips off to nearby national forests, the Monterey area, or (if you're feeling ambitious) up to the Bay Area. The park itself is off-limits to anyone except staff and researchers--no visiting me there, unfortunately! I'm not working for the reserve, but for a lab at Old Dominion University (waaaaaay over in Virginia). They're focused on these breeding group dynamics so, like my Yale adviser's liking for working in South Africa, these people come out to California every summer. Aside from the four of them, it sounds like there'll be 5-10 other researchers working on different projects. A small community, but certainly an interesting one!

Day-to-day work sounds like it will mostly be "very diligent birdwatching", as my dad put it: watching woodpecker holes and nests for how often they're visited, by which birds, with what kind of food, etc. There will also be some woodpecker-catching involved, and a lot of miscellaneous data processing. Finally, I get the chance to do an independent project as part of this--which, as I'm looking to head back to grad school within a couple of years, is an excellent resume-builder.

All in all, I'll be out in the middle of the woods from March to September. Enough people expressed interest in updates, photos, etc., that I decided to revive the blog; hopefully I'll be able to update it a bit more regularly than I did in South Africa! My internet will be limited due to the isolation and mountains, but not so much that I can't post some pictures every once in a while.

That's all I've got for now; stay tuned for initial reactions in mid-late March, and some more regular updates after that. A good winter to all!

Oh yeah, did I mention they store hundreds of acorns in dedicated "granary" trees? These are very bizarre birds.
https://tinyurl.com/ybg5pgrj