Just last week was the North American Ornithological Conference, a major gathering of ornithologists in Vancouver, British Columbia. Quite a few of our staff and scientists attended, and among them was Wes Hochachka, assistant director of our Bird Population Studies program. When last we heard from Wes, he was extolling the virtues of European warblers—but this time he happened upon a presentation about hormones, migration, and a couple of American warblers, and it got him thinking. Scientific conferences are packed with talks, lectures and poster sessions, each one offering a new insight or discovery—here’s Wes with one example:

I’m here at the fifth North American Ornithological Conference, and I have a problem… mind you a rather nice problem. With the conference’s size (an estimated 1,500 attendees) comes the problem of too much choice. When I’m not meeting and talking with friends and colleagues old and new, I have to choose which of 10 parallel presentations I want to see. On a number of occasions I’ve had to make a decision to see one presentation while wishing that actually I could also see a second in another conference room somewhere else on the campus of the University of British Columbia.

At other times, like this morning, I’ve found myself at loose ends and wandered into a lecture room on the spur of the moment because a talk’s title struck me as interesting. In this case, the speaker was a graduate student, Kristen Covino, of the University of Southern Mississippi, and she was talking about her research at the junction between ecology and physiology.

Covino was looking at the way testosterone concentrations change in birds over the course of spring migration. Now, when I think about testosterone’s role as a hormone, I think of how it affects aggression, increases muscle mass, and other stereotypically “masculine” traits. However, both males and females produce testosterone, and it plays many essential roles in a bird’s body.

Many of these are related to migration: birds preparing for a season of long, nonstop flights have to add muscle mass, control their deposition of fat (their key fuel source), and “decide” when it’s time to start migrating. Testosterone also spurs male birds to sing, which is the reason why you may hear migrating birds singing well before they have arrived on their nesting grounds—an obvious indication the hormone is starting to circulate in higher concentrations.

However, to date, no one has asked whether a burst of testosterone triggers migration and all of its accompanying changes, or whether there is a gradual buildup of testosterone as birds, particularly males, travel northward in spring. Kristen and colleagues took a geographic approach to this question: they caught migrating Magnolia Warblers, Northern Waterthrushes, and Swainson’s Thrushes in southern Lousiana—still many hundreds of miles from their breeding grounds—and took a tiny blood sample to determine their testosterone levels. Then the scientists headed north to coastal Maine to do the same set of tests on birds that had nearly completed their migratory journeys.

What Covino found was that there was no simple and single pattern. Magnolia Warbler males and females had identical levels of testosterone in the bloodstreams, and these levels increased as the birds traveled northward. For Northern Waterthrushes (another warbler species) males had higher levels of testosterone by the time they reached Maine, but females didn’t. Testosterone levels were low and unchanged for Swainson’s Thrushes.

So what about this inconclusive result caught my attention? Findings like this are exciting to me because they tell us that these birds are not simple mechanical objects that all do the same thing. Instead, they’ve evolved to display clearly different responses to the same (hormonal) stimuli. And more generally, to me findings indicate that birds possess enough flexibility in their physiological makeup to adapt to changing conditions. By heightening or dampening the way their bodies respond to changing hormone levels, these birds may be able to adapt to some of the novel changes in the world around them over the years to come.

For more stories from scientific meetings, see our archive.

(Image: Magnolia Warbler by dwaynejava via Birdshare.)

A quick update on the status of eBird’s supercomputing collaboration and their production of these cool animated occurrence maps. The team just released their latest five range maps, bringing the total now online to 15, and launched a dedicated page about the occurrence maps on their site.

A recent post on our Facebook page really brought out how much you folks love White-throated Sparrows—and it’s easy to see why; these sharp little sparrows are a delight on any winter’s day. As it turns out, they’re also featured as one of eBird’s five new occurrence maps, so let’s take a look at it:

Unlike all those Neotropical migrants, the map doesn’t start off blank in January—White-throated Sparrows are all over the eastern U.S. in winter. As the map clocks through summer you can see which parts of the country are lucky enough to have these birds year-round. Then fall rolls around and the birds flood back southward and in many cases, into your yard.

But what I really like is how well it performs next to the static range map for the species—even down to the tiny wintering population in Southern California. And yet this wasn’t drawn by hand—it’s coming from sightings by eBirders mashed up through the use of a “Spatio-Temporal Exploratory Model” with habitat information gleaned from satellites. For full details, see the Occurrence Maps page on eBird.

eBird co-leader Brian Sullivan gave a talk about the project this week at the American Geophysical Union meeting, one of the most high-powered annual meetings of scientists in the world, the place where Mars Rover findings and 100,000-year-old ice cores are discussed. (I love the mental image of a lone bird geek speaking to a horde of geophysicists.) I’m eagerly watching to see where this application leads next.

For now, I’m happy to watch the ebb and flow of the seasons, as written by White-throated Sparrows.

(Images: map by eBird; White-throated Sparrow by Kelly Colganazar via Birdshare)

What does the future of conservation look like? According to Wesley Hochachka, it looks fast and young. We last heard from Wes on the island of Helgoland, and before that in Brazil, but this week he’s at a conference at the American Museum of Natural History. Here’s Wes with his impressions:

Sure, I know that New York City has a reputation as a fast-paced place, but even here asking researchers to give a complete seminar in four minutes seems a bit much. Under these conditions, I suppose it was inevitable that someone would oblige entirely in haiku.

That’s just a glimpse of the energy and creativity in evidence at the first Student Conference on Conservation Science–New York. This conference, being attended by graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from around the world (several of them currently students in North America), is organized as a way of enabling the emerging generation of conservation researchers to make connections, exchange ideas, and help shape the direction of future research in conservation. It’s a sister to the highly successful Cambridge Student Conference on Conservation Science, which has been running since 2000 in the UK. Along with the students and postdocs are a few more-established researchers, including our contingent from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology: myself, director John Fitzpatrick, and Dr. Ben Zuckerberg, a research associate in our Citizen Science program. We are here as mentors, giving workshops, evaluating presentations, and engaging with the students. In theory we are here to impart knowledge, but in reality we are learning as well.

Even with the conference only at its halfway point, I have been impressed by the diversity of research topics presented in talks and posters, and especially by the abilities of presenters in the “speed talk” sessions. The idea is to cram as many presentations into the shortest possible amount of time, and then allow a 30-minute period for questions and discussions around the conference room.

In addition to the haiku describing research into predicted effects of climate change on life histories of cold-blooded animals (predicted to live shorter lives, work by Santiago Salinas, who is a student at the State University of New York, Stony Brook), another talk that caught several people’s attention was one examining human attitudes to threatened species, and specifically whether positive marketing of one parrot on the Caribbean Island of Dominica would rub off on the island’s other parrot (unfortunately, it doesn’t), which is work by Leo Douglas, a student at Columbia University. The general topic of human attitudes and their importance for the success of conservation projects is strongly represented on the sociological side of this conference. Those are just three examples of the diverse topics that are being discussed by the up and coming generation of conservation scientists from around the world.

Congratulations to winners Nick Saunders (overall, American Robin), Linda Alley (composition, Inca Doves), Chandra Jennings (group, Black Skimmers), Katy Bishop (habitat, Royal Terns), Linda Huffman (behavior, Mourning Dove), and Bernice Muir (people, Chestnut-backed Chickadee). Each of them won a bird feeder from Droll Yankees or Wild Birds Unlimited.

The Great Backyard Bird Count happens every February. It attracts nearly 100,000 participants who count some 11 million birds over four days, all across Canada and the U.S. (including Alaska and Hawaii). The next count is February 18–21, 2011, so mark your calendars. It’s a great way to get a little more out of your feeder watching, and the data help scientists monitor the populations of birds in winter on a grand, continent-wide scale. You can find out more about the count, and explore past results, on the website.

Can’t wait till February to join a photo contest? Try the WeLoveBirds photo contest, going on now!

I’ll admit it, satellites boggle my mind. Even though I’m quite happy to listen to my phone tell me where to find the best Caribbean restaurant in Albany, I still can’t quite believe that our species has built machines that fly around our planet and tell us what they see. But the truth is that satellites are so last century—so much, in fact, that scientists have begun using them to document historical changes. The above picture, from NASA’s 38-year-old Landsat program, shows the Lake Djoudj region of Senegal during a drought in 1979 and during a flood 20 years later. Even at this small scale it’s clear how much information the pictures contain about how the land has changed.

At the International Ornithological Congress last week,Wesley Hochachka, assistant director of our Bird Population Studies program, heard about similar plans to use Landsat data to find out how Important Bird Areas in Africa are faring through the years—without researchers having to get on a plane and see for themselves. Here’s Wes:

Many field ornithologists take fieldwork for granted: they routinely assess habitat conditions by going into the field and taking direct measurements. However, in many areas of the world this isn’t feasible. Trained biologists are few, travel is difficult or costly, and at times their safety cannot be guaranteed. At this IOC meeting, Paul Donald from the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds described ways to get around these challenges using freely available data from satellites in order to monitor the status of areas at relatively low cost.

Donald and his colleagues began their work-in-progress with three observations

• Data from Landsat satellites can be accessed freely, and
• Human beings are still better at analyzing images than computers are, but
• Most people lack an easy means to work with satellite data.

To this end, Donald and his colleagues created a computer program that allows someone with relatively little training to select an area of conservation concern—they started with Important Bird Areas (IBAs) in Africa. The program displays 20 years worth of satellite images, with images at five-year intervals. A person can then fairly quickly measure the amount of land within the IBA and around it that was in the habitat type of interest, as well as other types of land cover—key information that is important to bird distributions. For example, someone could assess the forested parts of an IBA and as a result identify whether it or its vicinity were stable or were being degraded. (The authors published a paper on their work in 2009.)

In practice, the authors found their computer program was very effective. With only a few hours of training, someone could accurately measure forest (or grassland) cover of an area, and changes in status. As a result conservation organizations with few resources could do basic conservation assessments that would otherwise be impossible.  Their next step is to conduct a general assessment of IBAs in Africa, and if this first test proves successful look for other areas in the world in which to make the computer program available.

The program will not provide all of the information ideally needed to assess conservation areas. Obviously, the presence of particular species of birds cannot be recorded from space, and partial degradation of forests may not be obvious from satellite images. However, in many cases the most critical information is whether or not areas of natural habitat are being encroached upon, or identifying which specific areas are facing the greatest immediate threats. With this information in hand, conservation organizations can devote their limited resources to address the most critical problems.  As a result, I thought that the work described by Paul Donald was an important and creative use of satellite image data for direct conservation application.

(Image: Landsat program, NASA)

More like this: Martjan Lammertink’s news from the International Ornithological Congress, and Wes Hochachka’s report on European bird conservation from a meeting in Spain earlier this year.

It’s time for another annual meeting of the American Ornithologists’ Union. Just like last year in Philadelphia and 2009 in  Portland, we’ll be bringing you stories from the floor of the meeting, where hundreds of ornithologists have gathered for four days of intense science.

First up is Living Bird editor Tim Gallagher to report on Monday’s plenary talk, given by University of Montana’s Ken Dial. Over the past decade, Dial and his collaborators have proposed a surprising new theory about how birds first began to fly. And with a wicked snowstorm shutting down air travel back East, the evolution of flight seemed perhaps the perfect topic. Read Tim’s account after the jump.

The 128th annual meeting of the American Ornithologists’ Union (which this year is a joint meeting with the Cooper Ornithological Society and the Society of Canadian Ornithologists) got off to a slightly bumpy start Monday morning at 8:00 a.m. It seems the first plenary speaker, Scott Derrickson of the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park, got stuck in the snowstorm blanketing Washington, D.C., and couldn’t make it to San Diego last night.

Not to be stymied by a little thing like inclement weather, the AOU leadership pivoted instantly and asked Kenneth P. Dial of the University of Montana to present his scheduled Tuesday morning plenary 24 hours early.

Now, for many people, having to deliver a talk a day early can be horrendous. There you are, expecting to have all this extra time to prepare and practice, but instead you just have to get up and go at a moment’s notice. Fortunately, Dial was more than up to the challenge. With his exuberant personality, a sense of humor and comic timing as well honed as most stand-up comedians, and a boundless passion for his topic of study, he presented his hypotheses on the evolution of flight in birds. In the process, he took on 150 years of entrenched dogma.

Dial began his talk by apologizing for not having time to dress up and get his hair done for the talk. (He was clad in blue jeans and a sweater and has a shaved head.) Then he launched into his talk, exploring whether bird flight had an arboreal (trees-down) or a terrestrial (ground-up) origin. The long-accepted belief has been that birds originated in the trees, but Dial takes on this idea, presenting a compelling array of data to support his view that flight originated from the ground up

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Others have pointed out that some feathered dinosaurs had tiny wings, much too small to be used in flight. Why is that? Were they just useless appendages? Or did they help vulnerable young dinosaurs to scramble up inclines to escape predators.

Dial has looked at numerous species of fledgling birds—tinamous, megapodes, brush-turkeys, chukars, swifts, pigeons, owls, and more—and has documented this kind of “wing-assisted incline running” in all of them. The young birds use their stubby wings to help them gain traction as they run up the side of a tree or other incline and also to flutter back down to the ground safely. Could this have been how flight originated—at first as a way for a fledgling to escape predators?

At the University of Montana’s Flight Laboratory, Dial uses high-speed x-rays to explore flight in adult birds as well as the mechanisms by which fledglings scramble up inclines—some at a 90-degree angle. (You can watch slow-motion videos of birds flying in wind tunnels.) One could easily imagine an Archaeopteryx making a similar ascent before diving off the end of a branch and gliding downward again.

Ken Dial ended his talk with a plea to ornithologists to always be open to new ideas in their research and especially in their teaching of young scientists. Whether or not you agree with his hypotheses (and he perhaps left the audience with more questions than answers), this felt like the perfect kind of rousing, fascinating discussion to get a meeting going. You could see it in the eyes of the students as they left the ballroom and walked downstairs for the coffee break.

(Image: AOU 2010 logo by David Stamp)