Category Archives: Being a scientist

March 17, 2020 · 5:26 pm

What are crows thinking when they see death?

Full disclosure: I am not actually going to be able to tell you the answer to this question. But I am going to get you closer than we have ever been before. At least by my standards. So now the question is where to begin…

Let’s begin by acknowledging that death means something to crows in a way that it doesn’t seem to mean something to most other animals, at least as far as we’ve recognized. What I mean by this is that crows don’t ignore their dead, they don’t reflexively flee from their dead, and they don’t just go about carrying out undertaking behaviors without a second thought (or a first thought). They really see their dead and they respond in a variety of ways. In my previous research, I found that generally, they respond to unfamiliar dead crows by alarm calling, followed by recruitment of other crows to the area to form a raucous group called a mob. Then they disperse after about 15-30min.

I’ve found that they do other things as well, like touching the bodies, though this really only happens in the spring. When they touch them they might gently nudge, peck or even copulate with the crows, though that latter one is exceedingly rare.

Other people have seen more curious things though. Upon listening to my garbled explanation of my studies, my dental hygienist removed her hand from my mouth and proceed to explain, with detectable urgency, that she knew about these funerals. That when she was a little girl living on her family’s farm her father shot a crow. Instead of leaving, the others brought sticks and dropped them on their dead flockmate. She’d never forgotten it.

What these stories tell me is that how crows respond to death is complex, and we are still far from fully understanding all their behaviors. And one of the hardest parts of this is that we can’t ask crows what they are doing. Why did you leave a stick that one time? Why did you rip up the body that other time? Why did you call for 30min minutes until your voice choked out, while your neighbors a quarter mile away looked later at the same body and then left in silence to return to the dumpster?

This barrier means that we stand a high chance of either under or over-interpreting their behaviors around death; for example, being unable to accept that we might experience the grief of death uniquely, or being unable to accept that we, in fact, do not. This is the challenge in studying how another organism responds to death, and it’s one I grapple with constantly.

There might, however, be one secret weapon into deeper parts of how crows respond to their dead that we can reach without needing a Dr. Doolittle-esque translator: their brains. While all animals only have a certain number of ways they can outwardly express themselves, how the brain responds to stimuli can tell you a great deal more about what an animal might be thinking. Which brings us to my newest paper.¹

Now before I go on, I’m going to say up front that I suspect this current study might not sit well with some of my readers. Until now all of my studies have used wild crows and did not require the handling of birds or any kind of direct manipulation. Spying on the brains of animals, however, is not so hands-off. It almost always requires surgery. And it’s almost always lethal. I say almost, because sometimes we can actually learn quite a lot without opening up an animal. Without slicing up its brain. Without keeping it captive forever. This is one of those times.

Most people are familiar in some capacity with functional neuroimaging, especially fMRI. It’s a way to look at how the brain responds to different stimuli without needing surgery or euthanasia. fMRI works by tracking blood flow while an awake subject encounters a stimulus. It’s how we have uncovered that psychopaths don’t experience empathy when picturing others in pain, or that some dogs value praise from their owners more than food.^2,3 Using fMRI in a non-human animal requires a great deal of training, however because fMRIs are big weird noisy machines that would be objectively terrifying for the uninitiated. Which means that they would never work with a wild crow. So instead, our team used a different kind of non-invasive imaging technique to spy on the minds of crows: FDG-PET.

Unlike fMRI which tracks real-time blood flow, FDG-PET tracks metabolic activity and most importantly it can do so retroactively. The FDG in FDG-PET, stands for fluorodeoxyglucose, which is a modified glucose molecule with a radioactive tracer attached to it. It’s the same stuff we give humans when we’re going to PET image them for, say, a tumor. The modified part is that unlike most glucose, this stuff doesn’t break down, it gets stuck wherever the body used it up. The tracer on the other hand, does wash out. Still, for a brief window of time-about 20 minutes after injection-we can stimulate an awake animal in a variety of way, visually, acoustically, etc., and the brain will use up the glucose (FDG) in order to process that information. The animal can then be anesthetized and placed into a PET machine where, via a mechanism involving photons and gamma rays that was far too complex for me to bother retaining beyond my graduate exams, the machine can detect the tracer. The imaging process takes about 20min, after which the bird wakes up, none the wiser for the invasion of privacy.

Crow scanner — An anesthetized crow in our specially fitted PET scanner at the UW Medical Center. The wingtips are bound during the scanning process to keep the feathers tidy and out of harm’s way. Photo by Andy Reynolds for Audubon.

After a lot of image processing and analysis, we can then infer how active a particular area of the brain was while experiencing one stimulus relative to a control. So while there are some advantages to an fMRI approach, FDG-PET is the only mechanism that allows us to see how a crow’s brain was responding while it was awake and unconstrained 20min ago, instead of while it is strapped down in a big scary scanner. At the conclusion of the study, each subject is banded and released. Although our study used only a modest 7 subjects (which is a normal sample size in the imaging world) it brings me great pride to report that, not only did all of our subjects survive, but all left our care with better or equivalent body condition than they came in with. Some of them have even been resighted successfully breeding in a subsequent season. Again, when it comes to spying on animal brains, this is the exception, not the rule.

Release — My former advisor and coauthor of the current study, John Marzluff, releasing one of the subjects at the conclusion of the study. Photo by Andy Reynolds for Audubon.

So now that some of the technical details are out of the way let’s get down to brass tacks and talk about what we actually learned from all this. Our lab has previously used this method to understand what neural circuits process different faces, like familiar friendly or dangerous faces, as well as how crows perceive different kinds of threats. But on the heels of my fieldwork looking at their responses to dead crows, we wanted to know more about what was going on in their brains. So we had a two stimulus paradigm: a visual one where we compared brain activity between when crows saw a dead, unfamiliar crow, and a dead, unfamiliar, song sparrow (the control), and an auditory one, where we played them recordings of wild, unfamiliar crows reacting to dead crows, and unfamiliar crows begging (the control).

To aid with our analysis we selected 5 particular brain areas a priori, which means before the study, to examine for brain activity. These sites included the hippocampus and striatum, which are responsible for fear and spatial learning, the septum and amgydala, which aid with social behaviors, conspecific recognition and affect, and the NCL or nidopallium caudolaterale, which is responsible for executive decision making like our prefrontal cortex.

Among the visual paradigm, what we found was that between the threatening (dead crow) and control groups (dead song sparrow and responses from three birds in a previous study that saw only an empty room) there weren’t a ton of differences in relative brain activity. Crows that saw a dead crow didn’t show more activity in the regions associated with affect, social behaviors or fear learning. Instead, what we found is that, like when they see a familiar threat like a hawk, it’s their executive center that shows the most difference.⁴ At first this was a surprise, but given the number of ways they can respond to their dead, and possibly because they didn’t know this bird, it makes sense that they might be wondering exactly what they should do in that moment. In case you are tempted to think that might be what’s going anytime they’re in this strange situation, know that a previous study using the same approach found very different neurological responses to when they see familiar threats, new threats, and friendly people.⁴ So there’s no reason to suspect that the protocol alone is what was responsible for NCL activity.

With respect to the auditory tests, we detected even fewer differences. The most notable finding was that both kinds of calls, alarm and begging, stimulated NCL activity relative to the birds that saw only an empty room. I can’t pretend to know exactly what this means. But it does bode well for my idea that crow communication is quite complex and context dependent, therefore requiring a great deal of brain power to decipher and interpret. But I speculate.

So, as I said, while this study in no way provided definitive answers to, “What are crows thinking when they see death?,” it’s gotten us as close as we have ever come and given us some good ideas for what might be going on. But as with all science, the first study is the one warranting most skepticism. I have no doubt we will continue to learn much more in future and I can’t wait to see where this study fits into the vast field of knowledge that awaits us.

If you would like to read this study in its entirety (which is full of extra details, analysis, and explanation) check out this link, which will remain active until April 15th, 2020. After that, shoot me an email if you want the PDF, I am more than happy to pass it along. If you would like to read the popular science article from the Audubon where many of these photos were sourced, but that came out before this study was released, follow this link.

Literature cited
1. Swift KN, MarzlufF JM, Tempteton CN, Shimizu T, and Cross DJ. (2020). Brain activity underlying American crow processing of encounters with dead conspecifics. Behavioural Brain Research 385: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2020.11254

2. Decety J, Chen C, Harenski C, Kiehl K. (2013). An fMRI study of affective perspective taking in individuals with psychopathy: imagining another in pain does not evoke empathy. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience: https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00489

3. Cook PF, Prichard A, Spivak M, Berns G. (2016). Awake canine fMRI predicts dogs’ preference for praise vs. food. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 11: 1853-1862

4. Cross DJ, Marzluff JM, Palmquist I, Minoshima S, Shimizu T, Miyaoke R. (2013). Distinct neural circuits underlie assessment of a diversity of natural dangers by American crows, Proc R SocB 280: 1–8

23 Comments

Filed under Being a scientist, Cognition, Crow behavior, Death, Graduate Research, New Research, Science

Tagged as crow brain, Crow death, crow funeral, FDG-PET, Functional neuroimaging

December 14, 2018 · 10:14 pm

Watching puppies…for science

When I was still in Alaska back in the fall, my social media was brimming with pictures of the kinds of things you might expect from a biologist studying birds in Denali National Park. Photos of bears, Canada jays, arctic tundra, caribou, snowshoe hares, ravens, mountain and…puppies? Not just the occasional pupper photo either, but piles of puppies, puppies on parade, and videos of puppies doing the kinds of pupper things that make even the most cold-souled of us go red with glee.

Most of you were probably thinking, “IDK why this is happening and I don’t care, just give me more,” but a few of you may have found it a bit odd that I appeared to be spending so much of my time with doggos rather than the birds I was in Alaska to study. But, no matter which camp you were in, let me take a moment to clear the air and confirm that my time around the puppies was purely professional.

Let’s start with a fact that is not well known among the general public, but is crucial to the story: Denali is the only National Park with a full-time sled-dog team. In fact, Denali has had a mushing team since 1922, starting merely five years after the park’s inception. At that time, the team was responsible for patrolling the park boundary for poachers. Today, the dogs help deliver supplies and humans to places within the park that become difficult to reach during the winter months.

In any given year, the park is home to about 35 dogs, which when not working live in the kennels near park headquarters. As a park visitor, you can go to the kennels to meet the dogs and see mushing demonstrations. Needless to say between its cultural significance and popularity with the public, the kennels at Denali are a source of pride and joy for many park visitors and staff.

There is one aspect of the kennels, however, that makes their presence a bit tricky from a wildlife perspective. Like all US National Parks, Denali maintains a dogmatic “no-feeding wildlife” policy. This is meant to keep wildlife wild and prevent dependency and human conflict. Feeding time at the kennels, however, can be a real smorgasbord for the local corvids, particularly if some of the dogs are slow or reluctant to eat. How such food supplementation may be affecting the breeding success (or mortality) of the jays is therefore of keen interest to my work.

In partnership with kennel staff, my tech and I sought to document which birds were attending the daily feeding at the kennels. I will do the same come the winter field season, and ultimately we hope to determine if such attendance has any impact on how many fledglings those pairs are able to produce.

So, as I said, while visiting the kennels and the park’s annual litter is all fun and games for most, for me it was serious, professional science business and nothing more. Can’t you tell?

8 Comments

Filed under Being a scientist, Canada jays, Field work, Wildlife

Tagged as Alaska, Canda jay, Denali National Park, Sled dogs

July 16, 2018 · 3:55 pm

Putting the “crow” in necrophilia

It’s early April 2015, and John Marzluff and I are standing with a film crew attempting to capture some footage of a crow funeral to compliment a story they are working on about Gabi Mann. I’ve already set the dead crow on the ground, it’s placed just out from a cherry tree resplendent in springtime blossoms. After only a few moments of waiting, the first crow arrives and alights on the tree, its head cocking around to get a better look at the lifeless black feathers beneath it. I hold my breath for the first alarm call, ready for the explosion of sound and the swarm of birds that will follow it. But it doesn’t come. Instead, the bird descends to the ground and approaches the dead body. My brow knits together in surprise but, ah well, I think, the shots of it getting so close and then alarm calling will make good footage. The audience will have no questions about what it is responding to. To my continued surprise, however, the silence persists; only now the crow has drooped its wings, erected its tail, and is approaching in full strut. No, no, this can’t be, I think. But then it happens. A quick hop, and the live crow mounts our dead one, thrashing in that unmistakable manner. “Is it giving it CPR?” someone asks earnestly. Still in disbelief, John and I exchange glances before shaking our heads and leaving the word “copulation” to hang awkwardly in the air. After a few seconds another bird arrives to the cherry tree and explodes in alarm calls, sending our first bird into its own fit of alarm, followed by a more typical mobbing scene. The details of what I’ve just witnessed as still washing over me when I hear John lean over to me…”You need to start your field season tomorrow.”

***

What crows do around dead crows is something I’ve dedicated much of my academic life to understanding. In the course of my first study, my findings made for a nice clear narrative: crows alarm call and gather around dead crows as a way of learning about dangerous places and new predators. Although there are other hypotheses we can’t rule out, certainly danger avoidance is at least partially driving this behavior. An important detail of that original study though, is that because of the way it was designed, with a dangerous entity always near the dead crow, our live crows were never in a position to ever get very close to our dead stimulus. So the possibility that they do other things around dead crows, like touching them, couldn’t be explored.

It’s been 3 years since that day in April and during that time it has taken every ounce of my power to remain tight lipped when journalists would ask “what’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned from your studies?” Because until we were able to scientifically vet the prevalence of this behavior, I wasn’t willing to say much about it for fear of making necrophilia mountains out of mole hills. But with our findings now officially available in the journal Philosophical Transactions B, I am delighted to finally share what has been the most curious secret of my PhD: crows sometimes touch, attack, and even copulate with dead crows.

Although this statement is jarring in its own right, what really gives it power is that we know this not just from that first fateful day with the film crew, but through an experimental study testing the response of hundreds of birds over several years. That’s important because it allows us to say not just what they’re doing but possibly why they’re doing it (and at least why they’re not doing it). So how did we conduct this experiment?

First, I dove into the literature to try and see if there was any precedent for this kind of behavior in other animals. Although there have been no systematic studies, repeated observations of animals touching, harming, even copulating with their dead occur in dolphins, elephants, whales, and many kinds of primates, among some other animals. Based on this, we hypothesized that this behavior may arise from: attempts to eat it, attempts to learn from it, or a misuse of an adaptive response (like territoriality, care taking, mate guarding, etc.). To test these ideas I searched the neighborhoods of Seattle until I found a breeding adult pair and (while they weren’t looking) presented one of four stimulus options: An unfamiliar dead adult crow, an unfamiliar dead juvenile crow, a dead pigeon or a dead squirrel. The latter two stimuli being key in helping us determine if the behavior was food motivated, whereas the nature and prevalence of the interactions themselves (common, uncommon, exploratory, aggressive, sexual) helped us address the other hypotheses. In all, I tested 309 individual pairs of crows; or in other words, once again I freaked out a lot of Seattle residents wondering why there was a woman with a camera, binoculars, and some dead animals loitering in front of their house for long periods of time.

Our main findings are that crows touched the animals we would expect them to eat (pigeons and squirrels) more than the dead crows, and although crows sometimes make contact with dead crows, it’s not a characteristic way they respond. Because this behavior is risky, this seems to back up previous studies in crows that suggest that they are primarily interested in dead crows as a way of self preservation and avoiding danger.

A crow tentatively pokes at one of our dead crows

That said, in nearly a quarter of cases, crows did make some kind of contact with dead crows. Like with mammals, we saw that these behavior could be exploratory, aggressive and in rare cases even sexual (about 4% of crow presentations resulted in attempted copulations), with the latter two behaviors being biased towards the beginning of the breeding season. Importantly, the latter two categories of interactions were rarely expressed independently, and it was often a mixture of the first two; in rare cases, all three. In the most dramatic examples, a crow would approach the dead crow while alarm calling, copulate with it, be joined in the sexual frenzy by its presumed mate, and then rip it into absolute shreds. I must have gone through a dozen dead crows over the course of the study, with some specimens only lasting through a single trial. It was an issue that may have been insurmountable if not for the donations of dead crows by local rehab facilities and the hard work of my long time crow tech turned taxidermist, Joel Williams.

It’s hard to witness this behavior without wondering if maybe the crows somehow don’t recognize that it’s dead and are instead responding like they might to a living intruder or to a potential mate. So we tested that idea too, by conducting a second experiment where we presented either a dead crow or a life-like crow mount. The differences in their response was clear. They dive bombed the “live” crows and less often formed mobs, just like we would expect them to do for an intruder. They also attempted to mate with the “live” birds but in these cases it was never paired with alarm calling or aggression. So the issue doesn’t seem to be that they think it’s alive.

The fact that this behavior was rare, and often a mix of contradictory behaviors like aggression and sex, seems to suggest that none of those hypotheses I outlined earlier are a good fit for this behavior. Instead, what we think happens is that during the breeding season, some birds simply can’t mediate a stimulus (the dead crow) that triggers different behaviors, so instead they respond with all of them. This may be because the crow is less experienced, or more aggressive, or has some neurological issue with suppressing inappropriate responses. Only more experiments will help us determine what makes this minority of birds unique, and whether expressing these seemingly dangerous behaviors are the mark of the bird that is more, or less reproductively successful in the long haul.

So while there’s still much more left to be explore here, I can finally say that this is without a doubt some of the most interesting behavior in crows I’ve ever witnessed. I hope you will check out the publication here, and seek out all the other amazing work being reported in this special thanatology (death science) themed issue.

***

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Filed under Being a scientist, Breeding, Crow life history, Field work, Graduate Research, New Research, Science

Tagged as Crow, dead crows, necrophilia, new publication, thanatology

February 18, 2018 · 2:23 am

ƨ’ileɒꓘ story

It still leaks through my writing sometimes. Missing or misplaced letters, even whole words conspicuously absent as if a miniature black hole opened up mid sentence. My grammar and punctuation leave something to be desired too, and all these problems are exasperated when I’m stressed or rushed. Childhood ghosts that love to pay visits at the most inopportune of times, haunting me with their reminders that my grasp of written language was a war hard fought, and not every battle was won.

As a kid, a mixture of ADHD and dyslexia made learning to read and write feel impossible. While my peers were in the worlds offered by their chapter books, I was getting lost in the world provided by my own imagination; a much friendlier place at the time than the outside one where my literacy progress seemed to be causing great distress among my guardians and educators. Things came to a head near the end of second grade, when an art activity to decorate flag with our name went a little ~backwards~. A meeting was set to discuss that I would not be permitted to move forward the next year with my peers. The repercussions of that fact pierced even the densest layers of my imaginary world. Instead of watching my friends sail away from me while I stayed in place, I chose to switch to a public school that had programs for kids like me.

The flag has been a staple of my parent’s home ever since 2nd grade, always stationed across from the bathroom mirror.

Over the next two years I saw psychologists and therapists, attended special literacy classes, got Hooked on Phonics, and made the dreaded daily trips to the nurse’s office for The Pills. I hated the pills. I can’t even remember why at this point. It could have been because of how they made me feel, or with what other kids chose to do with the information that I was on them, or some combination. Either way, it became my mission to get off them.

Returning to my old school had always been the goal, and by the end of 4th grade they agreed I had made enough progress to rejoin my peers the next year. I advocated that coming back wasn’t enough, I no longer wanted to be medicated. I would do whatever I needed to make that happen, and my 5th grade teacher took the reins in planning a strategy to help me. I never returned to the meds, even over the next three years as I continued to struggle and intermittently fail classes. Then, in 8th grade, my family moved out of state and I switched back from a private school to a public one. My new 8th grade coursework was almost identical to the 7th grade coursework at my former school. Suddenly, rather than trailing my peers, I was slightly ahead. Although slight, the margin was just enough to afford me the mental bandwidth of learning time management and self imposed structure. By the end of 8th grade I, for the first time, was excelling at school. And apart from the occasional bump, I continued to do well enough to eventually earn a PhD in avian ecology from the University of Washington.

I would never go on to be a top 10th percentile kind of person, and when it came to applying for undergrad and graduate programs I had more than one institution look no further than my numbers and respond with a hard, “pass”. In place of the skills that might make me an excellent test taker, however, some things much more valuable to me bloomed. A sense of creativity born out of those years deep in imaginary worlds. A willingness to ask for extra help and the ability to say the words “I don’t understand.” Finally, a sense of resiliency. I can fail or struggle many times and either overcome it, or make the choice to exert my energies in other ways instead.

These benefits and coping tools didn’t come right away though. These were not things I, as an 8, 10, 12, even 15 years old, could have just set my mind on and materialized. I process things differently than most people, and getting a handle on how to make that work within our educational system required tireless effort on behalf of myself, my family, and my educators, in addition to the simply the passage of time. Time to develop self-specific skills and coping mechanisms. Time to grow into my brain and realize that my value as a person, as a scientist, are not contingent on my successes or failures but how I respond to them. Time to embrace that it’s not the mid sentence black holes that define my writing, but the way the message resonates with the reader.

***

I wrote this piece in response to the handful of parents and kids over the years who have identified with my story. I wanted to offer a more permanent legacy that could be read and shared by those who wanted it. However, I do not intend for this to act as a roadmap for other people because, A) I recognize that not all families have access to the immense resources that my family did, and B) the culture and pressures of primary school has changed tremendously over the past couple decades, and C) the hard truth is that there is no roadmap or magic wand because every child is unique. For example now in my adult life I know plenty of people that benefit tremendously from medication. I know others that decided traditional academia was not a place they could thrive, and now they put their talents and enthusiasm elsewhere. What unites us is not how we learn to cope. It’s recognizing how valuable our stories and our minds are, despite existing in worlds that weren’t made for us.

♥♥♥

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Filed under Being a scientist, Just for fun

March 14, 2016 · 3:34 pm

Australian magpies are not corvids

Ah the Australian magpie. With its glossy tuxedo plumage, heavy bill, and charismatic reputation it’s no wonder it’s a favorite among corvid lovers. Why then, do scientists keep insisting that it’s not, in fact, a corvid? This insistence of ours can feel arbitrary, even perhaps insulting, to a bird that superficially looks and acts like the corvids we know.

A still frame from the infamously cute video of an Aussie magpie and a puppy play-wrestling together.

To address this question, corvid expert and my colleague, Jennifer Campbell-Smith, recently penned a terrific piece to lay the confusion to rest. I recommend everyone take the time to read it in full.

If you do not have time, the short version of the story is that physiologically, Australian magpies, like the other butcherbirds they are classified with, lack the nasal bristles indicative of corvids. Genetically, DNA work done in the late 80’s also showed that, while they share a common ancestor, are are phylogentically distinct from other corvids. There has been some back and forth since then on the details, but there’s no scientific evidence that we should be lumping them in with corvids.

The nasal feathers are those thin, wire like feathers covering the base of the bill on the crow to the right, but conspicuously absent on the Aussie magpie to the left. Australian magpie photo: Guy Poisson

Why this bums so many corvids lovers out is a curious mystery to me. Personally, I find the convergent evolution with respect to both appearance and behavior much more interesting than if we simply made a taxonomic mistake. As for whether corvid lovers should continue to find joy and fascination in observing these birds well, I’ll direct you to this video and let you be the judge.

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Filed under Being a scientist, Birding, Crow curiosities, Crow life history, Taxonomy

March 29, 2015 · 7:17 am

Yellowstone field experience

Last week I had the great pleasure of spending a week in Yellowstone National Park with both corvid expert, John Marzluff and predator-prey dynamic expert, Aaron Wirsing. In addition to spending an entire week with these two, I also had meetings and saw presentations from folks like the golden eagle team of Al Harmata and Marco Restani, the head researcher of the wolf project, Doug Smith, Bison expert Rick Wallen, and wolf and cougar kill expert Dan Stahler. It was an amazing week of breath taking wildlife and in depth expertise on what’s going on in the park. This week, I thought it would fun to take a little break from corvids and just share some of the photos I took along with the stories and biological details that go with them.

Birds
Ungulates
Predators
Miscellaneous

Birds

To kick the trip off we headed outside of Bozeman, Montana to meet up with eagle researchers Dr. Al Harmata and Dr. Marco Restani. They’ve been doing research on eagles for more than 30 years and know more about these birds than maybe anybody. Right now, they’re conducting an ongoing study to look at the effects of lead poisoning on eagles. Although lead shots have been banned in waterfowl hunting and in some states like California, in most other places lead bullets are still used for other kinds of game. The lead fragments end up in the gut piles hunters leave behind, or in the prairie dogs or other carnivores that their shooters had no intention of taking home. Eagles scavenge these remains and can wind up with deadly levels of lead in their bloodstreams. Elimination of lead from bullets will likely be a necessary step to protect eagles, though I expect a robust fight from the NRA and some hunting communities.

For corvids, spring time means nesting time and the magpies were busy at work. Unlike crows and ravens which build more traditional looking nests, magpies make nests with roofs, further protecting them from predators. If that’s not cool enough, magpies are known to build several of these dome nests and have been observed moving both eggs and chicks between them.

The magpie’s nest is the big clump in the middle of the tree

A bill-load of mud to finish off lining the nest

Seeing peregrine falcons perched along the 520 bridge on my way to school is always a treat, but there’s something about seeing them in this setting that’s all the more spectacular.

At lunch time we were greeted by John’s special raven friend, Big Guy, which has been visiting him in the park for the last 15 years. He and his mate were also busy nest building though we were unable to locate it.

Mountain bluebirds were such a spectacular addition of color to the park, and I was super lucky to be in the right place at the right time to snap this photo.

Ungulates

When we first arrived to the park, we were surprised to be greeted by pronghorn. John has been leading classes to Yellowstone for 15 years and had never seen them as far into the park as we did. Pronghorn aren’t adapted to run very well in deep snow, so they generally avoid the higher elevations in the park until later in the year. The snow melt came incredibly early this year, however, allowing them to penetrate further into the interior of the park than usual. While the level of early snow melt we experienced isn’t unheard of, it was unusual and fit the models that predict increased drought in this area as a result of climate change.

Bighorn sheep were prolific across the park. In the winter and spring, male bighorns form large groups while the ewes and lambs heard up to do their own thing. I never got tired of seeing those big curls!

Bison are truly the iconic ungulate in the park. Theirs is a story of an amazing comeback, and one that’s really not so different from wolves. As of 1902 there remained only 23 bison left in the park, and but thanks to ranchers and the US Army administrators of YNP, new animals were brought in and over the next 50 years that small population grew to over a 1000 animals. Now, the park supports about 4000 animals, and is considered the only place in the country that has both maintained bison since prehistoric times, and supports non-cattle hybridized bison.

Right now, bison regulation within the park is subject to much debate due to the presence of brucellosis. Brucellosis is a bacterial infection that was brought when settlers first introduced cattle to the west. It results in the abortion of calves in animals like bison, elk and livestock. It’s transmitted by contact with an infected mucous membrane, which generally happens when curious animals touch and smell the aborted calves. Although it’s not fatal to the mothers, the aborting of calves represents a potential economic threat to ranchers. Although elk are also important vectors of this disease, a rancher we spoke with echoed the opinion of the ranching community at large in saying that bison are the main problems and their departure from the park needs to be controlled. As of 2002, the Sate and Federal government developed an inter-agency management plan to control bison and the spread of the disease, which basically means that many (think in the thousands) of animals are killed once they cross the boarder. Lead park bison biologist Rick Wallen described to us the controversial nature of this tactic which results in, one the one hand, folks from the ranching community saying there isn’t enough being done, while on the other, members of the public decrying the park for killing such an iconic species. Despite these culls, however, the park maintains a stable population of bison, which other than run-ins with lakes and geothermal features, are basically free from predation apart from one particular wolf pack which occasionally manages to take one down.

One of my colleagues illustrating the difference between cow (left) and bull (right) bison horns. She also sports a radio transmitter used to track an individual bison across the park.

A couple of bison playfully testing each other

One of the most interesting insights from Rick was the observation that bison both engage in what looks like altruistic behavior, like the time he witnessed a heard protect an injured female from wolves, to completely brutal behavior like the scene my classmates and I had the serendipitous opportunity to witness.

We happened upon this scene when checking the area for signs of a bear we had heard was scavenging some bison carcasses. Although we didn’t see the bear, we quickly noticed that there was a bison calf trapped in the water, and not too far from drowning by the sounds of its breathing. The banks of these lakes are incredibly slick, and it can be impossible for an animal to get out. We watched with bated breath, conflicted between rooting for the bison to make its escape and for it to drown, as that would mean an almost guaranteed bear and wolf sightings the following days. Finally after about 10 minutes the calf managed to pull itself from the water. While all this was going on, its heard had been nearby and quickly after the calf escaped began to approach it. We were all expecting a Disney style reunion but to our shock the entire heard proceeded to haze the calf! They pushed it about 100 m down the valley before finally relaxing their assault and letting the calf rest and start to graze. Since we didn’t see bears the next day, our best guess is the calf managed to regain its strength and make it through the night.

A tree shows some ears after being used as a scratching post for a bison.

A tree shows some wear after being used as a scratching post for a bison.

Although much of our time in the park was dedicated to simply looking for, and observing wildlife, we also collected a couple of different kinds of data while we were there. For the last 7 years this class has been conducting “elk follows” which means that we select an individual elk in the different parts of the park and record its activities for 15 min. Later, we will use this data and match it up with data from the Wolf Project to ask questions about elk behavior, condition, and spatial use in light of the presence of wolves. This big bull was taking a little rest and is a great illustration of the hardship of winter. You can clearly see the low fat reserves on its rump, as evidenced by the outline of its spine and pelvic bones.

This bull is a good example of one that’s already lost its antlers, and it’s probably feeling a little lighter than its 5-point companion, since elk antlers can weigh up to 40lbs! Antlers are the fastest growing tissue and in the height of spring and early summer they can grow up to an inch a day. One of our faculty members, Aaron Wiring, told us an incredible story of seeing a big 6 point bull being chased by wolves in an earlier trip, only to loose one antler during the chase. A little lopsided, the bull managed to fend them off until it was finally cornered against a tree when, you guessed it, the second antler fell off. It was all over soon after that. Talk about bad timing!

Predators

A coyote makes off with the leftovers of a bison carcass. Coyotes are often killed by wolves, and they need to be extra mindful when in open spaces near kills sites like this. Why wolves are so predatory towards coyotes and not foxes is something of a mystery.

One of my favorite experiences while in the park was seeing the wolves. There’s just something about seeing such an iconic animal that lifts your spirit. The reintroduction of wolves was, and still is, incredibly controversial. There’s no doubt that their presence on the landscape is a threat to ranchers and pet owners alike, but I was inspired by our talk with Hannibal, a rancher who lives adjacent to the park boundary. Despite loosing three dogs and many sheep and calves to wolves, he maintains his position that they are a necessary part of the Western landscape and deserve a place along side he and his family. After his daughter, Hilary Zaranek, started range riding (rounding up and sleeping with the heard at night) predation by wolves dropped to nearly zero and their three current dogs seemed very happy to me. By shifting the ranching paradigm to one where multiple ranchers join herds and share space, range riders become a sustainable and economical option for ranchers. Hannibal and Hilary are the forefront of this shift and their dedication to the presence of wolves was awe inspiring.

While we were in the park we were privy to some pretty special changes going on within the packs. Inside the park, wolves are killed almost exclusively by other wolves. Recently, the alpha male of the Lamar Valley pack was killed by members of the competing Prospect pack after he confronted them. His death put the alpha female in an incredibly precarious position since she will be unable to hunt after she gives birth to her dead mate’s pups and in a few weeks. Although her 6 current pups are nearly a year old they are still too young to provide for her during this time. As a result, she is attempting to court 4 of the male members of the Prospect pack in an effort to gain a new alpha male that will help raise her pups. Unlike lions which will kill the cubs of a competing male, wolves will help raise the former dad’s pups after they take over. Some readers may even be familiar with the famous story of 8, the hero ‘little wolf” who did just this. While we were in the park the female appeared to be courting a spectacular grey male, but shorty before we left we learned that he fell out of contention. Who the next alpha male is is up to the alpha female, and only time will tell who she chooses.

The effects of wolves in the park have been profound and their necessity to maintain a balanced and healthy ecosystem is unquestionable. For more information on the wolves’ effects on the Yellowstone ecosystem check out this Ted talk.

One of the most interesting things we did was meet up with wolf expert Dr. Dan Stahler. He and fellow carcass expert, Kai, lead us to a recent cougar kill and described how to identify kills as either wolf or cougar and showed us the kinds of data they collect off such kills. Key signs off cougar kills are puncture marks around the throat, neat, cleanly picked bones, and characteristic caching (or covering and hiding) of the carcass. Wolf kills, on the other hand, are not hidden, show signs of hemorrhaging around the animal’s back legs, and the carcasses are found dismembered. This particular cow elk was killed and partially eaten by a cougar before being discovered by wolves and other scavengers.

Miscellaneous

A badger skull found while hiking the bighorn lambing grounds on the edge of the park boundary.

On our last day I spotted a couple of yellow-bellied marmots, marking the fist time John has seen them inside the park during this trip. I’ve never gotten such a good look at these little animals and I must say they’re very pretty!

Antler drops are an important source of calcium for many animals in the park, and this particular one shows its age with a beautiful patina of lichen.

A bison carcass lays peacefully in its resting place of Lamar Valley.

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Filed under Being a scientist, Birding, Field work

Tagged as Birding, bison, cougar kills, elk, magpie nests, magpies, necrospy, Ravens, wolves, Yellowstone

March 16, 2015 · 8:00 am

Crow curiosities: Do crows play and why?

A few years ago, on a mildly windy day, I watched a group of crows line up on the top of a building and then take turns flying off into the draft before letting it gently return them back to the rooftop to do it all over again. This continued for at least ten minutes before I had to bid my feathered friends adieu and go to work. Last summer, I watched two juveniles perch on a cable wire that ran from the power lines down to the ground at a steep incline. While one of the kids was minding its own business the other snuck up and pecked and pulled its sibling’s tail until the sibling lost its balance on the crooked wire and was forced to fly to a higher perch. Then the mischievous, ah hem, ‘pecker’ followed its sibling to the higher perch and started again. And every winter without fail, at least one person will send me the video of the snowboarding Russian hooded crow or the barrel rolling crow or the crows having a snowball fight. Ok, so that last one isn’t real, but with all the other videos of crows at play it certainly seems like it’s only a matter of time before they start hocking little crow-sized snowballs at each other. With all these videos and stories comes the inevitable question: Are corvids having as much fun as it looks like and, if not, what are they doing?

For scientists, this question is inherently difficult to answer. There’s the obvious part where it still remains impossible to ask animals how they feel about their activities, but at an even more fundamental level is the question of: how do we define play? Play, as all things in science do, requires a very specific definition that may or may not depart from how we use the word in everyday language. The most widely referred to definition is the following very dry and jargony sentence: ‘…all motor activity performed postnatally that appears purposeless, in which motor patterns from other contexts may often be used in modified forms or altered sequencing’¹. And with that, what I can only imagine must be one of the most fun things on the planet to study suddenly becomes sleep-inducingly boring and the humor of the picture below is no longer confined to biologists.

For now, let’s just focus on the part that said “…activities that appear purposeless.” That leaves scientists with a different problem; how do we define ‘purposeless’ (i.e do you mean right now, or indefinitely? What if it has a purpose but I just don’t know what it is?), and therefore, how do we even identify when animals are playing and when they’re not. Can you see the big circular rabbit hole we’ve gotten ourselves into? Since I think most people use the catch-all definition from Potter Stewart and simply say that you know it when you see it, it can be difficult to empathize with why play has been such a difficult behavior for scientists to say a whole lot about. Now that I hope I’ve given you some insight into why this is a difficult subject to study and thus, in many ways remains mysterious, let’s get to the fun part of talking about what we do know.

So far, observations of play in birds is limited to corvids, parrots, hornbills and babblers, reaching a grand total of about 25 species². To put that in perspective, there are ~10,500 species of birds in the world, making it an incredibly rare behavior among birds, and emphasizing the awesomeness of getting to observe it in our own backyards here in the PNW.

Although the snowboarding crow is probably the instance of crow play that gets the most attention, there’s actually 7 kinds of play that researchers have documented³. Maybe I’ll try and publish my observation of the bickering crow kids, but for now, irritating-your-siblings-play is not one of them. Here are the big 7:

Object play (manipulating things for no reason)
Play caching (hiding inedible objects)
Flight play (random aerial acrobatics)
Bath play (more activity in water than necessary to get clean)
Sliding down inclines (snowboarding, sledding, body sliding)
Hanging (hanging off branches but not to obtain food)
Vocal play (you know how kids go through that phase when they talk to themselves a lot? The crow version of that.)

A crow just hanging out

So what are we to make of seeing ravens hanging, apparently joyfully, from the ends of buoyant branches in our yards or magpies playing tug of war with an otherwise ordinary twig or crows doing elaborate aerial maneuvers for no obvious reason?

Young crows playing tug of war. Photo c/o Bob Armstrong. (The white eye of the bird on the left is not from disease or injury, but is the protective nicitating membrane that many animals have, in case you were wondering.)

Let’s start with the conventional wisdom that everyone grows up hearing: Animals play to practice skills they need to be successful later in life. Cats play with strings to hone attack skills, dogs wrestle to practice fighting skills their wolf ancestors would have needed as adults, etc. The problem with this wisdom is that despite all the intuitive sense it makes it turns out it’s not very…true. In mammals, it has been shown over and over again to be unsupported. In birds it hasn’t been looked at as extensively, and there’s at least one exception I know of that showed ravens play cache (hide things) to evaluate competitors so that they know who is most likely to steal their cache once the stakes are raised and they’re actually hiding food⁴.

Other then that, the vast majority of data across both birds and mammals have shown that animals who play most often or most fiercely are no better hunters or fighters later in life than their peers. Same goes for the studies that have compared animals that are allowed to play with those who were not⁵. No difference. So is it as easy as saying crows play just because it’s fun? Well the problem with that is that play can be risky. Playful, distracted kids are often snatched up by predators or accidentally killed by a miscalculation of their environment. With the level of risk that’s involved it seems unlikely it’s not doing anything for them. To make matters more complicated, although animals don’t seem to be better at the skills they appeared to be practicing, some studies show that they do seem to be better off overall. In mammals we’ve seen that they’re more successful parents and have longer life expectancies⁶. So what might be the adaptive value of fun?

Although there’s still much to be learned as far as testing play in corvids, right now I’m inclined to agree with play researcher Lynda Sharpe, who wrote a piece on this topic for Scientific American which I encourage everyone to check out. Stress is in no way unique to humans, and it can be as debilitating and deadly for animals as it is to us. Play is a great way for animals to hone their stress response so they’re less high strung as adults⁷. Not to mention the complex, stimulating nature of play helps the brain grow⁸. So why do crows play? Learning about their peers, gaining new experiences in a low risk way, honing their stress response, and growing their big brains all seem like a good excuse to have a bit of fun to me.

Literature cited

1. Bekoff, M. and Byers, J.A. (1981) A critical reanalysis of the ontogeny of mammalian social and locomotor play. An ethological hornet’s nest. Behavioral Development, The Bielefeld Interdisciplinary Project. pp296-337. Cambridge University Press.

2. Diamond, J, and Bond, A.B. (2003) A comparative analysis of social play in birds. Behaviour 140: 1091-1115

3. Heinrich, B. and Smolker, R. Play in common raves. In: Animal Play: Evolutionary, Comparative and Ecological Perspectives. Ed: Bekoff, M and Byers, J.A. Cambridge University Press

4. Bugnyar, T., Schwab, C., Schloegl, C., Kortschal, K., and Heinrich, B. (2007). Ravens judge competitors through experience with play caching. Current Biology 17: 1804-1808.

5. Thomas, E. & Schaller, F. 1954. Das Spiel der optisch isolierten Kasper-Hauser-Katze. Naturwissenschaften, 41, 557-558. Reprinted and translated in: Evolution of play behaviour. 1978. (Ed. by D. Muller-Schwarze.) Stroudsburg, PA: Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross.

6. Cameron, E.Z., Linklater, W.L., Stafford, K.J. & Minot, E.O. 2008. Maternal investment results in better foal condition through increased play behaviour in horses. Animal Behaviour, 76, 1511-1518.

7. Meaney, M.J., Mitchell, J.B., Aitken, D.H. & Bhatnagar, S. 1991. The effects of neonatal handling on the development of the adrenocortical response to stress: implications for neuropathology and cognitive deficits in later life. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 16, 85-103.

8. Ferchmin, P. A. & Eterovic, V. A. 1982. Play stimulated by environmental complexity alters the brain and improves learning abilities in rodents, primates and possibly humans. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 5, 164-165.

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Filed under Being a scientist, Crow behavior, Crow curiosities

Tagged as crow behavior, crow hanging behavior, Crows play, crows play in snow, ravens play, sledding crow, snowboarding crow, why do crows play

March 12, 2015 · 2:57 pm

A scientist’s thoughts on The Crow Box

The first time I watched the writer and hacker Josua Klein’s crow vending machine TED talk as a college undergrad, I was floored. It was my first exposure to Betty, to the tool making capabilities of some crow species, and to the idea you could potentially train wild crows. The purported success of the vending machine filled me with ideas. I used clips from the talk for a variety of public outreach presentations and they were always met with the same kind of GTFO amazement that I love watching people experience as they learn about crows.

Betty just doing her normal New Caledonian crow thing of making hooks out of wire to pull up buckets of food. No big deal. 🙂

As I moved on to graduate school, however, and was fully immersed in the scientific community of crow nerds, I started to hear rumblings that gave me pause. Rumblings that suggested the vending machine wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be and, in fact, had not worked as it was implied in that TED talk. Since I’ve never worked personally with Klein, I’ll let my fellow crow scientists speak for themselves on the issue. You can find one of the graduate students he worked with relating her experience during a reddit AMA here, and as well as the correction that the New York Times Magazine was forced to run after publishing an article on Klein’s effort with the vending machine. If you don’t want to read them, suffice it to say the main point is that Klein gave people the impression that it had been tested (successfully even) on zoo and wild crows when it hadn’t.

The Crow Box

Leading the public to believe that we’ve arrived at conclusions when we haven’t is the stuff of stress dreams for scientists, and it’s why the peer review process is the foundation of good scientific practice. By taking “results” that were only in the early stages of being tested and bringing them to the attention of the public without permission or support from the scientists he was working with, Klein burned his bridge to the folks who had offered to help him test the idea, and any other crow scientist he might approach next. Which brings me to the recent article I read titled “This Machine Teaches Wild Crows to Bring You Coins for Peanuts.”

No, it doesn’t. It might, but probably not. No one has been able to train wild crows to bring specific items in exchange for food, the website selling the machine even points this out. Gabi Mann did not intentionally train her crows to bring her things. They did this of their own volition which is why her collection is as diverse, unique, and beautiful as it is.

Gabbi showing me a sampling of her favorite gifts from the crows

The suggestion that this machine could train crows to bring you quarters holds about as much water for me as saying you could use a dog whistle to train wild wolves to roll over on command. The reason that the machine worked on captive birds in the Brooklyn apartment where it was originally tested is that, in captivity, you have a certain amount of leverage over an animal. You can motivate it with food or treats or affection. The chances that a wild crow would go to the effort of looking for coins when it could simply skip that step and look for other food seems insurmountable.

All that being said should you turn your nose up at The Crow Box if the idea intrigues you? No, go for it! Maybe yours will be the mind to figure out how to motive wild birds to participate. Or, perhaps you don’t care if it works or not, you’re just in it for a new experience or the joy of trying. Trying and failing is part of discovery and I see no reason people should wash their hands of it if it sounds like fun. Plus, even if it doesn’t work, you may end up learning different, but just as amazing things about these birds. Just don’t hold it against the crows if they decide it’s simply not worth the trouble and leave it to you to go collect the quarters you lost buying The Crow Box.

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Filed under Being a scientist, Crow behavior, crow intelligence, Crows and humans

Tagged as Crow intelligence, crow machine, Crow Vending Machine, Josua Klein, The crow box, Training crows to find coins

August 3, 2014 · 3:04 am

Notes from the field: That golden moment

I am a huge fan of podcastes of all kinds. Especially when I’m working a pair of very “avoidy” birds and I’m basically in for several hours of watching an unchanging pile of food on the ground, an earbud with a good story is the key to maintaining my focus on the sidewalk, rooftops and trees for any incoming birds. One of my favorite podcasts is The Story Collider which describes itself as “stories about how science touches people’s lives”. I highly recommend it for both science geeks and non-scientists alike, but I imagine it resonates deeper with those who feel engaged with science on a more regular basis. A common theme of these stories is “the golden moment”, and whatever that may mean for the storyteller. Which got me thinking: What’s my golden moment?

Conducting research in an urban environment, especially a study as conspicuous as mine, has it’s benefits and drawbacks. Drawbacks include: Confrontation over the study itself, people or pets unknowingly interfering with experiments, sometimes unpleasant or slightly risky work environments, etc. But the advantage is easily summarized: I get to engage with all kinds of people about my research. I derive and immense amount of joy from explaining my study to folks, especially in the company of children. There’s one particular moment in the course of the experiment, however, that stands out from the rest.

At a certain point in the study I have the masked person walking around instead of remaining stationary. Today I found myself conducting just such a trial and, frankly, these tests can be rather awkward. I can hear people whispering about the masked person, what they might be doing (often they don’t notice their “UW CROW RESEARCH” sign) and rarely are they emboldened enough to ask and, frankly, it’s probably for the best because I need my full attention on my birds during these tests (I’m working the camera while my volunteer walks around). As you can imagine, it can be a bit uncomfortable to cause such a stir and then just keep walking leaving people to scratch their heads (or think worse) about what they just saw. But occasionally the golden moment happens. That moment when they’ve noticed the mask, perhaps even read the sign and are eagerly discussing what a bizarre scene they’ve just witnessed with their companions when, boom, in comes the crow. Suddenly, without my needing to explain it, every onlooker can see precisely what’s happening: A crow knows that person and they don’t like them. An explosion of scolding, body language and flight patterns makes the target of their animosity well known. During these moments without any effort or intention, people are experiencing science. They’re watching crows and potentially learning something new about them. They will not know the full back-story to what’s going on of course, but there’s enough information laid right out there for them that conversations about crows and their intelligence and antics are inevitable. Suddenly the bird so many people ignore becomes the object of fascination and attention. These are the moments that I believe create changes in attitudes about crows and, more broadly, what science research looks like. These are my golden moments.

Notes from the field: Reflecting on my first season

This year, my field sites range through the east side from Mercer Island to Kirkland. My first field season, however, took place throughout downtown Seattle and included the ID, First Hill, the Central Business District, SODO, Belltown, and South Lake Union. I went to high school on Mercer Island and, while certainly a victim of the “MI bubble” as we called it, generally felt pretty familiar with the west side. I went into my field season last year anticipating to learn a lot about birds, which I did, but what I had not expected was to learn as much as I did about the city and the people it harbors. In fact, I doubt there’s anyway to become more intimately familiar with the real identity of a city than to spend from dusk to dawn on its streets, just watching.

Watching from the same spot on the sidewalk for 2 or 4 hours, invites the attention of all kinds of people. Lots of these are people who, come nightfall, remain on the sidewalk. Partly what I learned from these interactions is that they too watch the crows, and delight in sharing their stories. My favorite was someone who told me that the reason crows can be seen methodically wiping their bills on branches is because that’s how they mark their landing spot for next time. I suggested that it’s likely a way for them to keep their bills clean and well manicured (like fingernails, bird beaks never stop growing), but he couldn’t be dissuaded. It was such an ingeniously creative idea, I didn’t blame him for being so stubborn. The other was a man who informed me that if it were up to him, we would be wiping out the crows. “They attack the eagles and I just can’t stand for that, it’s unpatriotic”, he explained while wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with an American flag and a proud eagle head.

It wasn’t all positive, of course. There was the woman at six in the morning in the ID who causally sat down next to me and started smoking crack. Or the guy who sits on the walking bridge to the ferries who threw a stroller onto the street below where it landed about 3 ft away from me. But mostly it was just unintentional conflict. Arriving to an experiment site with a desperate amount of limited time only to find someone sleeping the location I had established as the feeding/experiment site. Or people eating the food I had set out. That was tough. How do you ask a hungry human being to not eat food off the ground because it’s for birds? In some places I just started bringing snacks. In others, folks with whom I had previously bonded with over the crows could address these folks by name and explain the situation for me. That was easier but it still felt…bad.

On the other side of the spectrum were the people on their way to work or who were renting the pricy downtown apartments who “see you everyday and just can’t figure out, and now must know, what you’re doing”. They too were delighted to tell me about crows. Mostly they insisted I come to their house because “there are more crows at my house than anywhere else in Seattle.” But they could also problematic, and usually in ways that threatened the whole seven day experiment and not just a few minutes of it. I am now an expert at identifying the sometimes surprisingly subtle line in the sand between public and private property in a city. When you’re throwing food on the ground, or asking masked people to stand around, this distinction can mean the difference between a successful experiment, and security being called and days of wasted work. But even on public property, food on the ground is in a constant state of peril.

Something I don’t know if a lot of Seattlites are aware of are the omnipresent human street sweepers. I’ll never forget watching the 2013 LGBTQ pride parade (well, less watching than quickly walking by it between trial sites) and feeling such pride and joy that so much proactive passion has paid off in this state, only to return to Belltown at five the next morning to find the sidewalks covered in apathetic rainbow garbage. But, like clockwork, the street sweepers came out to erase the evidence of people so figuratively and literally intoxicated with activism they forgot about the other battles to care about (like the planet). The street sweepers themselves were always a roll of the dice. Some would not hear one word about leaving my pile of food for the experiment while others laughed and obligingly kept moving. Many grew to recognize me as I moved on from one site in the city to another and would happily use it as an opportunity to take a break from work and engage with someone who would give them the time of day.

Then there are all the stories of people who span the spectrum. I listened to two men emerging from the 5 Point at 5:00am, causally exchange a story of witnessing sexual assault (and doing nothing). There was the time I overheard a group of people talking about a friend on their way to jail over what, suffice it to say, was a graphic murder. They were not happy once they discovered I was filming during this conversation. Not on purpose, but their conversation was in the line of fire for filming my experiment site. This was maybe the most danger I was ever aware I was in during my field season. But some calm(ish) explanation of my research diffused the situation and led to, you guessed it, crow stories. Then there was the guy who, unaware that the woman he was talking about was standing near him concealed in one of the experimental masks I use, proceeded to annihilate me personally to a friend. He was certain that that woman who is usually always here “watching birds” was a lazy, entitled piece of shit who is wasting her parents money.

“Excuse me, I’m doing a research study, will you please wait here while I take of this mask? And watch my camera?” (Shortly after this photo was taken I had professional looking signs made)

But stories like those are less common. What really demonstrated the spirit of the city to me were the dozens of people who, after being approached by the muffled voice of a creepily masked person, agreed to watch my video camera while I ran to remove the mask. You see, the most important piece of data I collect is the time it takes the birds to return to the food site after the “dangerous” person leaves. If it consistently doesn’t take them long then I can surmise that the presence of this person isn’t resulting in a change of feeding behavior. If, on the other hand, I show that their feeding behavior dramatically does change then I can say that seeing people associated with dangerous things like dead crows or predators causes birds to avoid areas they hang out in, even if those areas are good food resources. Ideally, I had a volunteer be this person, and maintained my position a ways away as the friendly feeder person who innocently stands around watching the birds eat. But volunteers were in short supply, and sometimes I had to show up to an experiment site, throw out the food as myself, the friendly feeder person, and then run to a hiding spot and don the mask. At the end of the exposure period I needed to leave to remove the mask and collecting this key data point was contingent on finding a person willing to hear me out while I wore this crazy mask, wait for what, to them, was an unknown amount of time, and, critically, not steal my video camera. Over the course of my field season I asked dozens of people of all stars and stripes (I was on too critical of a timeline to be judgmental or picky) and not one of them ever bailed or took my camera. Like I said, I received an unexpected education of this city and the result was learning that the vast majority of people here are in fact extremely wonderful.

And bathroom codes. I know the code to every Starbucks bathroom from SODO to SLU.

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Filed under Being a scientist, women in science

Tagged as crow research, grad students, graduate research, urban research, women in science