So, for a good deal of time it was accepted that birds didn’t use their sense of smell. Then someone came along and looked at seabirds foraging on the open ocean and discovered that they’re using smell to find pockets of prey. Somewhere in there someone discovered turkey vultures use smell to find carcasses. Through all this most researchers thought songbirds (most of the small terrestrial birds you see) still didn’t use their sense of smell. Apparently that’s been debunked in Zebra Finches which is cool given the amount of research that goes into that species. 

On that topic, there’s a really cool article done in France that was published in 2009 that suggested that Blue Tits have preferences for different aromatic plants to use in nesting material which help stave off parasites. Preliminary study with some cool findings. Gonna try and keep my eyes on the researchers to see if anything new comes up.

url if you wanna check this one out:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005104

As per my blog description: birds are rad. I inherited an interest birds from my mom who passed away when I was fairly young. We had a small backyard with plenty of bird feeders while also keeping four chickens and two parakeets as pets. This early exposure to birds then caused me to gravitate towards them during my undergraduate stint at CSU Monterey Bay. The majors at this university are unbelievably broad so having some direction helped to an astronomical degree. Using the skills I acquired I was able to get involved with several different opportunities during these interesting four and half years. I did an ecology project on shorebirds which led to the teacher connecting me with a local avian researcher, who in turn connected me with a local bird banding program. Bird banding is one of the greatest things I’ve done within my field. Holding wild birds in hand is absolutely amazing. If you get a chance to visit a local banding station, take it! They generally welcome volunteers. I started just writing down data for the first few weekend but eventually on slow days I was shown all the techniques and eventually I was doing full net runs on my own. During all this i decided i wanted to go to grad school and become a researcher.

Because i had the skills from working with the research and bird banding, i was accepted to a research experience for undergraduates doing birdsong research in Kansas. REU’s are awesome, as I’m sure any summer internship is. Take the opportunity if you get one! Not only was the research awesome, what made the whole experience was the people I met and the non-research related experiences and shinanagins that we all had in the Midwest. We even had a reunion that following New Years in Minnesota of all places, which was fantastic. 

This research led to an even cooler project in Nova Scotia studying bird smell (olfaction) where I was able to do a mapping project of a Leach’s Storm-Petrel Colony for researchers from UC Davis and a genetics lab from Harvard. This was also awesome being stuck on an island for a month. This was a great adventure where I was again able to meet some great people that I still keep in touch with.

Moral of the story/TLDR: Small class projects can lead to some pretty big self discoveries and awesome experiences.

So, for this blog thing… I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m probably more gonna use this to motivate me to go find interesting articles/info/pics from the bird realm, which I’ll post here. I’ve also recently applied to graduate school, which I’m sure plenty of other people are going through/just finished going through. I got accepted to a group a while ago which has been unbelievably helpful with the application process so I’ll also forward some of the info I get on negotiating with schools and all the other fun stuff that happens during the spring. 

Here’s me during a summer research project in Nova Scotia. Just got done collecting a blood sample from a Leach’s Storm-Petrel adult.