Bad news for birdies

10 Day Old nestling barn swallows wait for mom and pop to bring food

Throughout the field season, the birds in our study have worked diligently to pair up, build nests one beak full of mud at a time, lay and incubate eggs, feed nestlings, and in their down time, feed themselves by hunting down hundreds of fast-moving aerial insects. You have to be impressed with the little guys. But often times, despite all this effort, eggs disappear in the night, nestlings are pushed out onto the ground, or the entire nest falls or gets knocked down by a careless site owner. In recent days we have lost around four entire broods of nestlings. A nest check one day--four hungry baby barn swallows; then, on Day 10 after hatching, when we are scheduled to go measure nestlings and take a small blood sample for paternity analysis--an empty nest. Or a destroyed nest. Or four crumpled, pitiful grey bodies on the ground. Nine out of ten times this is the work of "serçe", the global invasive species known elsewhere as the house sparrow (Passer domesticus). Everywhere I have recorded barn swallows (in Colorado, Israel, Romania, and here in Turkey), the songs have often been overlapped by the strident, monotonous calls of house sparrows. Like pigeons, house sparrows have colonized the globe, thriving in the urban habitats created by man. Unlike pigeons, though, house sparrows are very aggressive, and will often raid a swallow nest, nuzzle the nestlings out, and then "redecorate" the place with a mess of straw and lay a clutch of eggs.

At one of our sites in Karadyi, for example, a pair had built a nest in a tractor shed where several house sparrows were living under the roof tiles. As I sat in the garage one day, waiting for the male to revisit the nest and fly into our mist net, I watched a male house sparrow come in, fluff up his feathers and strut about, calling noisily. About that time, my target male came back, swooped at the sparrow, who ducked and flew away. Unfortunately, this particularly wily male also saw my net and flew out. We still haven't caught him, but during the following nest checks we saw the nest go from four chicks, to three, to one. Each time, a new nestling was found on the floor. What can you do? What should you do? As a biologist you shouldn't interfere--it's my job to observe and try to have as little affect on what I'm studying as possible. But then, we're already interfering--it is human constructions that barn swallows use for their nests. But humans are also responsible for creating a seemingly ideal and unlimited habitat for house sparrows all over the world...In any case, it just kills me when this stuff happens because the nestlings aren't eaten, they're just killed. And what's worse, the nest is often not even used by the offending sparrow. 

A mother and baby common pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pipistrellus)

But on a more positive note, when we were last trying to catch the male at the tractor shed site, we rolled down the garage door a little so our nets could cover the whole entrance and two mouse-looking things and a lot of droppings fell out onto the ground. On closer examination, there were actually six bats--two females, each with two suckling babies attached. They weren't hurt from the fall, fortunately, and were not aggressive when we picked them up to put them back. I don't really know bats, but my best guess is they are common pipistrelles (Pipistrellus pipistrellus). Anyway, it was a pretty cool encounter. I was really impressed that once put back on the wall, the females carried two pretty large babies (each attached to a teat) up the concrete face, back to whatever small entrance they used to access the garage door roll. It's sometimes scary to think about how much we've reshaped the earth's landscape in a very short time. But when you see three species like these somehow living together (not peacefully, but coexisting nevertheless) in a small, totally artificial space, it's kind of reassuring in a way.

A black-winged stilt (Himantopus himantopus) hunting in the shallows of the Koprulu River

Well, as for the rest of the project--we've caught all but one of the birds with active nests at our sites and we're wrapping things up to prepare for my departure in 12 days. Some of the birds will continue to raise a second or third brood after I'm gone, no doubt. Hakan, Ozgun, and Leyla will be in charge of collecting these final data and Hakan will bring any remaining samples with him when he comes to Boulder in October to help out with the analysis portion of the study. I'm happy to say things are finally quietening down around here and I've even had time to check out some other birds, like the stilt above. I have also started getting my 50GB of audio data in order to start analyzing songs. I'll be presenting a poster on geographic variation in barn swallow song at the end of this month at the Animal Behavior Conference in Virginia. More on that later. For now, I'm looking forward to watching the Ghana-Uruguay World Cup match in a couple hours! Both teams have been playing really well and it promises to be an exciting game. (And since Ghana eliminated the US, I'd like to see them go far, as it would make us look better.)

Well, görüşürüz.

Matt

Vampires and Barn Swallows

The Catholic Cathedral in Cluj, at dusk

Last night I returned from a weeklong trip to Cluj, Romania, the historical capital of Transylvania. The purpose of my visit was to sample from a known population of H. r. rusticas (the European barn swallow subspecies), to take measurements and sample blood, feathers, and song. Beforehand, I didn't know what to expect. Having never traveled in the Balkans, I didn't know if the language barrier would present a big problem, if people would welcome Americans; would we be able to capture and record enough birds?; how much time would our contact be able to help me?; and so on. Also, as I mentioned in my last post, it was supposed to rain during my entire stay, which was a little unnerving. In fact, it rained every single day I was there. Fortunately, we were left enough gaps between downpours to complete our work.

Me, Peter Pap, and his student, Orshi

After a harrowing double transfer flight with too many hours of layover to think about right now, I arrived in Cluj-Napoca at around 10:30 Thursday night. The first problem was that I had never met our contact, Peter Pap, and so neither of us knew exactly who we were supposed to meet. As I came out of the terminal I looked for someone squinting and glancing around. I saw one guy who appeared to be a bit confused, but we just kind of looked at each other in this Larry David kind of way (for any Curb Your Enthusiasm fans) and then I walked outside. The same guy reappeared and we looked at each other again, but then he turned and went back in. It was after that I figured, this has to be my contact, because no one else is looking around, so when he came back out yet again, I said, "Hey, are you Peter?" After a second the man said... "Yeah."

It's strange coming to a place you've never been, meeting up with someone you've never met and then immediately loading your stuff in their car and letting them drive you somewhere. This was the case when I first came to Turkey and had never met Hakan. At that time, he was also late, since he apparently had gone to the wrong terminal, and so I had to buy a phone card, navigate the VERY un-user-friendly Turkish telephone system, and call his cell to arrange a pickup. This time Peter was fortunately waiting for me, so he drove me to my hostel and we arranged to meet at 8 the next morning to head to the study site.

Downtown Cluj, Romania

Next morning, at the planned time, we headed to Cojocna, a small village about 45 minutes east of Cluj. Peter told me the village was founded over a thousand years ago for salt mining, and it is now the home of Hungarian, Romanian, and Gypsy farmers. On this first day we caught 12 birds. As I had hoped to catch about 15 males and 15 females to get a good sample size, this was, well, awesome! We then took a break for coffee and it rained for two hours before we finally gave up waiting and headed back to the city.

By the third day in Romania, we had caught all 30 birds I had established as a goal for the trip. In the following days, I endeavored to record as many males as I could.

Gergo (fore) and Orshi (back) hiking to Cojocna

Since Peter was busy on Saturday, two of his students (Orshi and Gergo) and I took the 5:30am train to the village. It apparently stops 3km away from the village, though. When Peter told me this, I thought he meant 3km walking along a flat, narrow country road. What he actually meant was, "3km through muddy tracks over rolling hills of open pasture." The landscape was really beautiful, but it took us an hour to get there. So, when Peter wasn't available again to drive me to Cojocna at 4:30 in the morning on Tuesday, I decided to stay in a really tiny house at this cool little (literally) hostel/camping site on the edge of town Monday night. That night it rained for several hours straight and in the morning when I got up, the "camping" area was flooded and the sky was dark. After several infuriating hours of slogging through mud, having dogs bark at me, males not sing, and struggling to identify birds in the gloom, I managed to scrape out enough recordings to complete my dataset. Excited to head back to Cluj, I negotiated my bill with the "hotel" proprietors, who spoke Hungarian, and no English, and lugged my huge pack of equipment to the bus stop to find that the road out of town was flooded and the bus would not run today. A local boy at the bus stop, who apparently spoke only English greetings and curses, smiled wryly at me and held his thumb up to indicate how I should get back to town.

The Colorado beetle (Leptinotarsa decemlineata), a worldwide potato pest from North America

In the end, a lady at the small grocery store who spoke surprisingly fluid English found a local guy to drive me back to Cluj via a long, meandering road through the countryside. Incredibly, after driving over an hour through some very windy, crumbling roads through breathtaking country, he dropped me off in the city center and would not accept any payment. In fact, pretty much everyone I met in Romania turned out to be extremely friendly, helpful, and many spoke very good English, which was very welcome I can tell you. All in all, it was an extremely successful trip (more than I could have hoped for). On the downside, as is always the case, I suppose, on a work trip, I had very little time for sight-seeing. That will be for another trip, hopefully before Romania switches from the Lei (1 Lei = 0.29 USD) to the Euro (1 Euro = 1.3 USD).

Little house on the prairie

So now, and for the next three weeks, it's back to work in Turkey. I've still got a lot of banding to do to finish out our work here so I can come back to the States in mid-July with a solid dataset to show for all our hard work. And now, I'll leave you with a toast:

Cheers:
in Hungarian--egészségedre (eh-guh-shuh-geh-druh)
in Romanian--noroc (no-roke)

Travels in the Southwest

In the last two weeks we have passed the 100 banded adult mark and then eked into a doldrum week without catching anything, despite our best efforts. With swallows you really have one or two chances to catch them on first arrival to a site. After that, even the most human-acclimated birds will alarm call at you and refuse to go back to their nest. And thereafter you will be a marked man--barn swallows seem to be able to recognize and discriminate between individuals and even between cars. It's a very irritating trait. (For me, the hated biologist.)

The Duden Waterfalls

But the arrival of my girlfriend, Amy, on the 2nd seemed to change our luck. In recent days we've banded a number of key males, added two whole families (adults and nestlings) to our study, and I got some excellent recordings. Amy and I also managed to see a bit of the region within easy driving distance of the study area. I say easy distance, but not easy driving. I tend to agree with Amy's suggestion that Turkish drivers don't seem to have received the "defensive driving" training common in the US, but rather a form of "ninjitsu-kamikaze driving." But, I managed to get around and miraculously avoid getting permanently lost or colliding with vehicles or people that seemed to genuinely want me to hit them.

Happiest boat in the harbor

Among the more interesting stops: the Duden waterfalls north of Antalya, the ruins of Aspendos (including an amphitheater dating back to the 4th Century), the ancient cliff city of Myra, near the modern day city of Demre and location of the Church of St. Nicholas. (Like myself, you may be surprised to learn that St. Nicholas died in 346AD, was Turkish, and rather than deliver presents to children all over the world, was known for putting coins in people's shoes and is also the patron saint of mariners.) The church, like many of the Old World historical sites I have visited, was very small. But still, it's pretty incredible to know that you're in a structure that dates back over 1.5 thousand years. It would have been more incredible if there were not 200 or so Russian tourists crammed with Amy and myself in the tiny church. We had a similar experience at the "Chimera," near Olympos, to the West of Antalya. This is a place where eternal fires burn on the hillside from natural gas vents leaking from a chamber below. The site was the inspiration for the Greek legend of the chimera, a fire-breathing monster with the body of a lion, a tail ending in a snake head, and with a goat head inexplicably coming out of its back. Although no doubt cool, the fires were not as big or numerous as the crowds of rude Russian tourists gathered around them.

Sea view near Olympos

In any case, it has been really amazing to have Amy visit for a time (and change our luck with banding), and to see a little of southwestern Turkey. I've been totally oblivious to most of the country, isolated as I am in a tiny rural town. But today Amy is making her long way back to Colorado and I am waiting for my flight to Istanbul, Bucharest, and then to Cluj, Romania, where I'll be trying to band and record some known H. r. rusticas for my study and for a larger study involving barn swallow populations all over the world. As the historical capital of Transylvania, my trip to Cluj should be interesting and I can only hope the forecast days of thunderstorms won't prevent me from recording and seeing a vampire museum or two. Well, that's all for now.
Pax,

Matt

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)