Greetings from the tundra. The past few weeks have been some of my favorite of the field season— time for nestling and fledgling birds!
Scholar Holler: Dr. Barbara Clucas
Dr. Barbara Clucas is an Urban Ecologist at Humboldt State University and an alum of UC Davis Animal Behavior graduate group. Last spring, she returned to UCD to give a talk about her recent work examining human-avian interactions in Seattle, Washington and Berlin, Germany. While she was here, she sat down to chat about her…
Creature Feature: Weddell Seal
Animals have evolved to wonderfully conform to the environments in which they live, and animals that live in particularly extreme environments have some particularly amazing adaptations. One such animal is the Weddell Seal (Leptonychotes weddellii). With a large and stable population (estimated at around 800,000 individuals) and the ease with which humans can approach them,…
Field Notes: Ryane’s first field season at Chicken Camp!
I’ve recently returned from my first field season and as I’m settling back into Davis, I wanted to take a moment to talk about my research in Wyoming studying the mating behavior of Greater sage-grouse! Sage-grouse are basically weirdly-awesome, tricked-out prairie chickens (thus, Chicken Camp). Greater sage-grouse are currently being considered for listing under the Endangered…
Field Notes: Frozen then fried…wacky weather on the tundra
Whew! A lot has happened on the tundra in the past two weeks! Since my last post the weather has gone from one extreme to another with multiple snow-storms and now blistering heat. While I’ve been coping with the weather by switching between my parka and sunhat depending upon the day, how do birds fare…
Creature Feature: Pink Fairy Armadillo
Any idea what the smallest species of Armadillo is? You guessed it! It is the tiny (only 3 or 4 inches long), and ever so cute, Pink Fairy Armadillo (Chlamyphorus truncatus)! This little resident of a small area of central Argentina is found in sandy desert areas where it lives by digging under ground with…
Field Notes: Alli’s First Season Studying Tree Swallows in Davis
This is my first field season studying birds, which means that this is the first year that my friends and family call me with their anecdotal bird encounters and sightings. Sometimes I know the answer – like the territorial female cardinals that are terrorizing my sister’s house in Virginia. But other times I wonder if…
Technically Speaking: GitHub and grad school – can you reproduce my results?
One of the fundamental virtues we are taught to expect from science is the reproducibility of its results. For such a vanilla concept, reproducibility is argued over quite a bit in the scientific community, especially in the wake of the open-source-software movement (1, 2, 3). It is in this spirit that I would like to share my user experience with GitHub, a…
Creature Feature: Japanese Spider Crab
Ever wonder how big the biggest arthropod in the world is? I have, so I figured I would do a bit of poking around and see what I could find. Turns out, the world’s biggest arthropod is really big indeed! It is a crab called the Japanese Spider Crab (Macrocheira kaempferi).
Scholar Holler: Dr. Michael Sheehan
Dr. Michael Sheehan is currently finishing up a Ruth Kirschstein National Research Service Award postdoctoral fellowship in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley working with Prof. Michael Nachman. Next month, he will be starting as an Assistant Professor in Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University. Earlier this spring, Dr. Sheehan gave a talk at UC Davis on his…
theethogram.com 