This past year, Dr. Isaac Ligocki, an NSF post-doctoral fellow with Dr. Rebecca Calisi here at UC Davis, set out to do field work in Northern California. He aimed to examine the effects of a common group of pesticides: the pyrethroids—deemed “safe” alternatives for agricultural use. Widely used in the California Central Valley, these chemicals…
Author: Victoria Farrar
I'm a PhD student in Animal Behavior at UC Davis, studying how hormones work in the brain to control stress and reproduction (in birds!).
Creature Feature: Loggerhead shrike
Imagine a little songbird, with black feathers encircling its eyes, a sleek gray body, whistling a high-pitched tweet toot-toot. The kind of bird that on first glance, you might mistake for a miniature mockingbird. “Aww,” you might think, “what a darling tweety bird!” Well, you’d be mistaken. Much like the “killer rabbit” of Monty Python fame,…
Field Fiasco Friday: Chupacabra Attack!
Field Fiasco Friday is a weekly segment highlighting the follies, foibles, farces, and failures that accompany any successful field season. Through this segment, we’ll share the stories of scientific data collection that don’t always make their way into the published results. In early January of 2016, my colleagues and I headed out to South Mountain…
theethogram.com 