Episode 14: The Candidate

The past week has been more of the same, really. As is often the case in science, but really with almost any job, much of the time is spent doing repetitive tasks. And so it goes: get up; record; rest; eat; enter and organize data; eat; go band; eat; sleep (hopefully dream about something other than eating and banding); wake up; repeat. But occasionally, something really cool happens. In this case, Hakan and I caught a pair of birds two days ago that were among the darkest we have seen. The female was darker than most of the males in our study, and Yoni told me that the male was dark even for birds in his Israel population. For me, there is really no question that this male is not a European barn swallow, and is the most clear candidate Hirundo rustica transitiva in our study so far. This is another strong indication that we are actually studying a contact zone between two subspecies of the barn swallow--which is really exciting! It also means that we may actually be able to answer the main question driving my study--Can divergent mate choice actually isolate two populations enough to lead to true species formation? It's a promising finding, but we'll have to wait for all the clues to trickle in before I can say anything definite.

In any case, that's the big news for the week. Also, Ozgun and Leyla are now back, having finished finals, and are now totally dedicated (at last) to the project. Hakan and Leyla Ozkan have gone to Antalya with the car for the weekend, so yesterday we walked to town with all our banding materials and tried for four and a half hours at a number of sites to catch some birds that had so far eluded us. Unfortunately, all but one female continued to do so. The setup at Ahmediye 93 ("Ekmek Site"), where we caught the Israel-banded bird, was particularly disappointing. I was sure I covered all my bases. We put the net in a dark hay storage closet just inset from the window, closed the door, so there was only one way for our target pair to access their nest, and turned on a song playback that we've used to catch at least a dozen birds. I put the playback on loop and we stepped back, waiting and watching a little boy play with a goat and throw pebbles at chickens.

Then, after at least a half hour, the pair showed up. They perched on the end of a cane pole, looking expectantly at the closed door they usually use to get to their nest. The male made a tentative flight toward the place where our net lay (invisibly) just inside the window. He perched again. The female did the same. I listened--Yes, the playback was going. The pair sat. They sat some more. The dummy male continued to sing in a loop inside the hay closet, sounding less and less like a real bird with each repetition of the track. I cursed at the male and told him, "Go to your home! Why won't you go to your home?!" He gave me a look from his perch at the base of the pole hanging from the low ceiling, the 20g of his being challenging me contemputuously--"Is this all you got?!" Unfortunately, it was...for now. We still have about three weeks to catch that male, which just moved in from another site this week. He and his mate are building a new nest after a neighbor nailed a board over the only point of access to their site for unknown reasons, preventing them from brooding their three eggs. These birds are definitely persistent...but, I'll get them...hopefully. Well, time to go try for some birds.

Fins aviat,

Matt

Daily Dose of Turkish: I am a biologist--Ben bir biyolog um (ben beer beeohlohg um)

Kuşçular! Kuşçular! Kuş Kuş

A common pipistrelle bat (Pipistrellus pipistrellus) caught during night banding

This is a common phrase I hear as I'm walking or driving about town these days. It means, more or less, "Birders, the birders are coming! Birds birds." And it's usually old men sitting in chairs outside a certain cafe or on benches or standing in shop doors that greet me with this, shouting "Amerikalı" with a grin that says, "I find your presence here baffling and endlessly amusing." In other words, it's pretty much the same as in Colorado, except that here my name is "American" instead of "The Bird Guy".

In any case, the days since my return from Israel have been action-packed. First, I got strep throat and was down for about three full days and have made a slow, but complete recovery after having a very good first visit to a Turkish doctor. As with nearly every occasion in Turkey, my visit to the doctor began by having "çay" (tea) as Hakan explained my symptoms and what I was actually doing in this village in the first place. I was then prescribed antibiotics and some sundry other medications (I was also sporting an impressive two dozen or so mosquito bites I had picked up in Israel at the time), and sent on my way to get better (which I now feel I have done, fortunately).

Male plumage variation--Questions: Who's sexiest? Are there 2 subspecies?

Apart from my being sick, Hakan and I have been very busy trying to band as many birds as humanly possible, provided the workaday complications of the unexpected return of cows and chickens to barns, destroyed and abandoned nests, sites boarded up, and other problems associated with working in close contact with humans trying to go on living their lives. Despite all this we have now managed to band over 90 adults, 100 nestlings, and I have recorded really good samples for over 15 males for whom we have full data. We've also started taking standardized pictures of banded individuals, following a method Yoni taught me, so that we have a good and measurable indicator of physical appearance to help us sort out differences between subspecies and in case our feather card samples don't make it to the States. The only other exciting bit to relate is that one of the females in our population was already banded when we caught her. She was caught two months ago by a team from Tel-Aviv University in Eilat, Israel, 880km away. It's really fascinating to learn that this female started her journey in places unknown, passed through Israel, and came all this way to build a mud nest in a cow barn behind a small bread market. A little glimpse into the adventuresome life of a barn swallow.

Samed, Ahmed, myself at "City Building"

In other news, Ozgun and Leyla will come back after their exams next Friday and the workload will be a lot more manageable. I have a backlog of data and feel strained to record in the morning after working all day and night banding and doing nest checks. Fortunately, in the absence of field assistants, two village kids, Samed and Ahmed have taken up an interest in helping us and did an entire series of nest checks in Bogazkent with us today.

Well, I guess it's time to enter those nest checks into Excel...hope things are going well for you, my valued readers. Please post a comment if you get the chance. It's nice to hear from you!

Cheers,
Matt

Side Excursion to Israel

Me at the River (or Creek) Jordan

Last night, at about 11pm, I got back from an intense five day trip to Israel. The purpose of this trip was to record around 10 males of a known population of Hirundo rustica transitiva to have an example of this subspecies' song to compare birds in my population to. If there is a hybrid zone here, determining a subspecies song signature could be helpful in figuring out which individuals belong to which population. (After hearing it, whatever differences there are seem to be VERY subtle.) Also, no one has characterized transitiva song, so it should be interesting for that reason alone.

Overall the trip was a great success! I think I brought home good recordings for 10-15 males, many of whom we have detailed morphological and reproductive data for. While in Israel, I stayed with Yoni Vortman and his family in a Jewish community at Amiad Kibbutz, about two hours north of Tel-Aviv, near the Sea of Galilee. Every morning Yoni and I would wake up at about daybreak and Yoni would take me around the neighborhood, which is kind of like a college campus, with cars only allowed around the periphery, and show me  the barn swallow nests in his population in hopes of finding males singing. Early on we had good luck--our first stop showed a male singing right into my microphone for an extended bout. The first day I recorded a decent sample for about four males, but the second day, we only got one male to sing a full bout of songs in five hours of recording. Fortunately, the next day we did better, and on the fourth day I only recorded for an hour before I had to get going to catch a bus to the airport.

Yoni Paddling his family and friends on the Sea of Galilee

I can't believe how quickly it all went by! But it wasn't (quite) all science--I did manage to fit in some excursions after recording each day. At about 10 each morning, the wind would start to pick up and birds would stop singing from perches, so I took advantage of that time to see the River Jordan in the Golan Heights, go swimming in the Sea of Galilee, hike down to a cold natural swimming pool along a hexagon-shaped crystallized lava-flow, and check out a nature sanctuary filled with ancient ruins at Gamla. I also got a brief visit to Yoni's lab at Tel-Aviv University on the way to the airport, where they have a zoo for research, conservation programs, and public education. It was a truly amazing trip, though exhausting, and I look forward to going back, as I did not get a chance to see many of the historical sites, or visit Jerusalem or the Dead Sea region.

A graceful prinia (Prinia gracilis) sings from a dried stalk in the Golan Heights

But for now it's back to work in Turkey. Hakan has been busy in my absence--they caught several pairs and added another site with two active nests. I now have several males to record here, but there are still a LOT of unbanded adults out there. And unfortunately, Özgün and Leyla Kaplan will be gone for two weeks taking final exams, so it will be up to Hakan and myself to band them. But...I guess they don't just give those PhDs away...

-Matt

Daily Dose of Hebrew: "Wow!"--וואו (pronounced ?)


*I added about 70 photos from my trip in the Field Season 2010 album.

One Nest at a Time

Mosque on the main drag in Karadyi

The general plan these days is for me to get up early, drive to a site or two and try to record several songs from a focal male we have already banded. In the afternoon, we either rest, do data entry, band nestlings, or do nest checks. At night we try to band as many birds as possible. Lately we've been catching about two pairs (both male and female sitting on the nest) each night and luckily we also netted a few birds that had slipped away and not shown up for several clear nights in a row. 

A relatively dark male with huge tail streamers and his mate

So things are going very well: we've now banded 36 adults and 38 nestlings--which brings me to my next point. The reason I am here, as opposed to Colorado or almost any other place in the Northern Hemisphere, is that I am interested in studying a contact zone between two subspecies of barn swallow. Since nobody knows exactly where these contact zones occur, I was lucky to find Hakan, who had previously seen birds he visually assigned to both subspecies in this area. When I came here last August to briefly meet Hakan and check things out, I saw very light-colored birds, and some which I also thought were way too dark to be of the European subspecies. But there is not currently any clear dichotomy between subspecies, so we have to try to piece subspecies identity together with a handful of clues. We look at streamer length (the European subspecies have longer streamers on average), color (the Middle Eastern birds are darker on average), and we will look at the ratios of isotopes in their feathers to determine the approximate location of birds when they molted (i.e. where they migrate). Given that there is quite a bit of overlap in the other two characteristics, this last bit should be really helpful to figure out which subspecies intermediate birds belong to, since the Middle Eastern subspecies only travels short distances to winter, while Euro-swallows will fly as far as South Africa to winter. (Though why they would fly back to Europe and miss the World Cup this year is beyond me.)

In any case, the fact that we have banded birds of drastically different streamer lengths and colors looks good. Also, there seems to be a huge difference in the beginning of reproduction within our population, since we will have banded over 50 nestlings

A female perches on my hand for a while after banding

by next week and many of the birds in our study have still not laid their first egg. This is consistent with the transitiva subspecies not migrating as far and being able to return and get started with breeding earlier than their European rustica counterparts. But this is all preliminary and only after we've gotten the isotope results will we have an idea of whether or not birds in our population do have two distinct migratory behaviors. And I am also trying to record as many males as I can in order to see if there are any consistent song differences among dark vs light or early vs late-breeding birds. We currently don't know anything about song in any subspecies of the barn swallow except the European, and any differences are VERY subtle, so it's hard to know what to look for. But, more on how I'll go about answering my song questions later.

Hasta luego,

Matt
Daily Dose of Turkish: Seeya later--görüşürüz (goora shoo-russ)