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)

Busy-ness as usual

Things are pretty hard right now, since I'm the only one fully dedicated to the barn swallow project at the moment. Özgün and Leyla Kaplan, who are undergrad field assistants, are still working on Hakan's migratory bird banding project, as well as taking

The walk to town to record

classes a few days a week at Akdeniz University in Antalya (1 hour away). Hakan has his own project and is teaching an ornithology lab, and Leyla Özkan has her own PhD work on lapwings and a job as a tutor. So that leaves me, and a waxing and waning crew of 1-4 to band birds, find new sites, record male songs, stay on top of activity at all nests in our study population, and deal with other logistical issues that inevitably arise. There is the added problem that our study sites (if you're interested, you can check them out here) are spread out over around 4 square kilometers and we only have 1 car. I'm trying to get us a bicycle, but so far it has just meant walking a lot all over town.

This is a European Wryneck (Jynx torquilla) caught at the migratory bird banding station--please ignore my narration ;)

But despite all the difficulties, I think things are going quite well. I have had mixed success with recordings due to the unpredictable behavior of birds and to a larger extent, humans (and their tractors), but the last few nights we have been catching at least two pairs of birds, which is nice, because you can usually assume that if a pair are sleeping together on a nest, they are "together". But, this may not always be the case, or, may not be the case always, because the other night we caught two birds at a new site. The birds were sitting on the nest together, the female unbanded, but the male was a bird caught at Mustafa's house (~200m down the hill). A few days ago I noted that there were three birds on the nest at Mustafa's (the male in question, and two females) and I am wondering whether the third wheel was this extra female. An intriguing love triangle indeed...

In other news, I went to Antalya yesterday to give a talk to the Biology Department at Akdeniz University. Hakan's advisor, Dr. Ali Erdoğan, and the department chair had requested it, so after a brief recording session in the AM, we headed to the big city. Antalya is like a more tropical version of Boulder, with palms instead of spruce, and with the shadowy spine of the Taurus range in place of the Rockies, as an ever-impressive backdrop. It's also a much larger (pop ~700,000) and towering city, with huge groups of apartment complexes covered in satellite dishes rising to the sky. In any case, the talk went fine, though I think the 30 or so people present had different takes on my presentation (in proportion to their fluency in English). Some comments I got were 1) "Acoustic divergence in crickets has been shown to be negligible in allopatry, but is much greater when species are found in the same place, have you seen a similar pattern in swallows?" and 2) "um...what?"

Yes, that's a car tied to a truck with a rope

Afterwards, Dr. Erdoğan treated the whole field team to lunch and then Hakan, Leyla Özkan, and I went to purchase some field supplies at a shopping center. After that, we parted ways, since Hakan and Leyla had more business in Antalya (Hakan's coming back tonight), and I was given the task of driving back to Bogazkent. Overall, the trip was uneventful, but I was surprised to learn that when someone honks at you, it could mean anything from: "Hey, I don't know if you noticed, but the light is about to turn green and you should go" to "Hey, I don't know if you noticed, but I'm not in a turning lane and I'm coming over across your lane of traffic anyway." So once I figured that out, everything went fine. Also, lane lines are not so much a strict boundary as in the US, but more suggestions of the rough area you should direct your car most of the time. Anyway, I need to get some lunch and do some data entry. Hope all is well back home!

Cheers,
Matt

Daily Dose of Turkish: Yes/No--Evet (eh-vet)/ Hayır (hire)

End of the First Week

Tuesday and Wednesday morning I went to one of our sites to start recording barn swallows we banded Monday evening. Hakan and the others were all in Antalya either to take or proctor mid-term exams, so I was by myself at the apartment passing the time recording or organizing our data collection system. Tuesday's recordings didn't go so well because I showed up at the site at about half an hour before the town woke up and a half dozen tractors and motorbikes chugged past while I was recording. Often, the driver would shout some greeting at me or another person on the street right as my bird of interest started singing. Nevertheless, I stuck it out for quite a while, getting about three and a half songs of any quality. Just when I had given up, Mustafa (the site owner) and his neighbor, neither of whom speak English, came down to where I was packing up my things and indicated they were about to eat and insisted several times that I come up and join them. I was very happy for the invitation and impressed with the Mustafa's generosity at inviting some Man Who Stares at Birds into his house for lunch. And though the neighbor and I tried valiantly to carry on a conversation, it appears that my 10 word vocabulary just isn't cutting it--so I'm working on that.

Sonogram of the first song recorded from a male for my study

Hakan and Metin came back late Wednesday night and were snoozing away yesterday morning when I left to try to record. As soon as I shut the door to leave, I realized I had left my good headphones inside, along with the house key. Oh well, I thought, and walked on to the site, where I found that all the birds were perched close together on a wire (a recordist's nightmare--because you often can't know who is singing or overlapping at a given time). Furthermore, my focal male was not to be seen. I started the recording and the wind started picking up (another big problem for recording), just as my first set of batteries failed. Replacing the batteries, I stood there waiting as the bird didn't show up and kids started to trickle into the school abutting the yard where I stood, occasionally peering in at me curiously. An old woman came out of the neighboring house and gave me a distrusting look, ignoring my greeting and going about sweeping the entrance to her home. Not an uncommon reaction--whether in Turkey or Colorado--I thought to myself. I shrugged internally and looked back up at the place where I thought my bird would perch. Just then--was that singing?! I turned around and looked back to the wire where

A European Goldfinch I saw on the walk home

the twenty or so barn swallows had been earlier and saw--were those tail feathers painted blue? Yes, it was my focal male. I jogged quietly (or as quietly as one can jog on gravel) over to get a stronger signal. The bird was singing his third song in a bout as the wind started to pick up. The male, seeming to sense my presence or perhaps just to mess with my head, left his perch, flew over and landed where I had been waiting for him all morning and started singing. I jogged back over into the yard, trying to record as I went, but as soon as I got there, he stopped and flew into the barn. Just then, a gust of wind maxed out my microphone and I checked the display. Batteries half full. As things were going so swimmingly, I thought this was a good opportunity to "hit the old dusty trail" home.

Recording aside, yesterday was quite a success. Hakan, Metin, and I went back to Mustafa's site at night and caught two more males and several females. We have now caught and banded 9 barn swallows for our study!  Hakan and Metin went back to Antalya today, so I'm on my own again to record and map out our sites till they get back on Saturday. I'm going to try to get to the site a little after dawn tomorrow to try my luck at recording the males we caught last night. More on that to come.

-Matt

Daily Dose of Turkish: Thank you= "teşekkür ederim" tesh-eck-coor  ed-er-im

Site surveying

Over the last two days, Hakan and I have gone around the towns of Bogazkent and Karadyi looking for barn swallow nests. We usually go about this by wandering around town and poking our heads into garages and abandoned buildings. When someone inevitably turns up to ask the natural question, "Uh...what are you doing?" I say hello (Merhaba) and defer to Hakan, who will go into a long explanation in Turkish wherein I recognize a few words--"Amerikali," "Matt," "Colorado," and "Kirlangic," which means barn swallow. I just stand there, like a dog, understanding 1 word out of 20, looking between the people speaking and nodding my head expectantly. Then, the person will sometimes shake my hand and show us into a garage or carport, and say some more things I don't understand and laugh, to which I smile and follow along.

We have had pretty good luck so far, mapping out forty or so sites with the GPS and taking note of whether we've seen birds in the area or if there was new mud on an old nest. Male barn swallows return from migration earlier than females in order to locate and defend existing nests or build new ones. So far, it seems there are few females around, although we found one full clutch of 5 eggs and another nest with 3 at one garage in Bogazkent, as well as one nest with 4 eggs in an apartment stairwell in Karadyi. Fortunately, most of the nests don't even have the feather linings that usually precede egg laying, so hopefully we still have some time to get set up and start banding birds before the main onset of breeding. Right now or plan is to do one survey in the morning and another in the evening. Yesterday, during our evening circuit around a Bogazkent neighborhood, a group of kids decided to follow us as we slinked around barn doors and scrambled on top of tractors to peer into dark nests with a flashlight and extendible automotive mirror. I imagine it was a pretty interesting experience for them. One of the boys seemed particularly impressed, or at least confused about how to respond, since he gave me a short bow when we climbed back in the car to head to another area. Tonight we will survey some more of Bogazkent, and maybe try to band a few birds. I am eager to get birds banded and start recording.

-Matt