We Went Birding

I've been meaning to update this many times throughout the week. My only excuse is that time on the island seems to behave differently than time in the real world. I study from a spot that overlooks a lake and my lecture halls have been in a forest, a park and outside of a literal castle. My time keeping has shifted from days and hours to a simpler construct: day time, night time and meal time. If I didn't need to know when to show up to eat I wouldn't wear a watch.

That said, there have been some interesting events over the past week. Yesterday we sat in on a guest lecture from the Director of Ohio's Department of Agriculture. There were some power issues as a large storm coincided with dinner that evening and a good bulk of the lecture was in the dark. While this lecture was open to the public, as a student at Stone Lab I was able to attend with no complications, it was given on Gibraltar Island following the evening meal. Students here have access to not only high profile instructors, but there is opportunity to meet individuals from various fields that intersect with science, politics being one of them.

That said, the first really exciting day of class was today. On Monday our class went to look for salamanders in a forest on South Bass Island, but we found none. Otherwise I would have talked about those. The forest was nice, but pictures of overturned logs with no redback salamanders under them just weren't that interesting.

Today's lecture was much more interesting. For the first half of class, our lecture was entirely outdoors. As part of EEOB 400 at Stone Lab, we have a large lab component that involves capturing, banding and measuring red-winged blackbirds and cardinals to compare the two populations on Gibraltar and the surrounding islands. In the above photo our instructor, Dr. James Marshall, is holding a second year male red-winged blackbird that we had just put through the measurement gauntlet. Which is why he doesn't seem to be very happy with us.

The purpose of our major lab is to examine the differences in various measurements (wing length, leg length, beak size, etc.) between populations of red-wings, which are migratory between many islands on Lake Erie, and cardinals, which tend to be permanent residents of each island they live on. In theory, we should notice larger differences between the cardinal populations measured on each island and the red-wing population on each island, as the red-winged blackbirds will exchange genes with other populations, potentially mitigating any local adaptations that may occur. This is less likely to happen with cardinals as they have much less frequent gene exchange with populations on neighboring islands.

We don't know if the differences between each bird population will be significant, but not knowing something just means you have to do science to know that something. So we're going to do science.