Why so aggressive Mr. Sparrow? by Jenn Scales
Thesis: Variation in male song sparrow aggression and its possible correlation with territory quality
Primary Advisor: Melissa Hughes
I started the MES program with no idea what I was going to do for my thesis. I knew I wanted to do a thesis, but that’s just about it. I hopped online and started looking at faculty who were working with topics I found interesting. After reading a few published papers I approached Dr. M. Hughes in the biology department. Turned out she was heading up to PA for her regular summer doing research with song sparrows and was willing to take me along provided I had an interest and a plan. I quickly got both. We decided the most feasible and potentially interesting idea was to look at variation in male song sparrow aggression in relation to their territory. She had been studying this population of sparrows for over 10 years and thus provided quite a bit of background information that really helped me get started.
Dr. M Hughes taking a picture of one of the territorial male song sparrows on the PA state game lands.
Thus my Thesis adventure began. First step was funding. Dr. Hughes was very open about not having any funding for me but she was willing to help me write grants and so that’s exactly what I did. All in all, I got close to $3,000 to do my research up in PA. In addition I now know how to write a grant, 2 birds 1 stone. The next few months leading up to my trip to PS I spend in writing my thesis proposal and learning about song sparrows (I had to goggle one to see what they looked like.) Anyway long story short, I found myself up in Linesville PA around May 11 th 2008 and freezing to death, but it was absolutely beautiful and warmed up nicely by June. I would get up around 4:30 or 5 am (depended on when the sun was due to come up) get as bundled up as I could and head out to “work”. Dr. Hughes and I spent our mornings on State Game lands where the majority study took place and at first I would shadow her learning the ins and outs of working with Song Sparrows, eventually I went off on my own to work on my research. I could not have made nearly as much progress as I did without the additional help of Dr. J. Hyman from North Carolina. He taught me the magical ways of Play Back and Flight Initiation Distance (FID) experiments (used to asses aggression and boldness respectively). I walked around plotting territories with my nifty GPS, played songs for male birds and recorded their reactions, walked toward males to see how close I could get before they flew away, made general observations and attempted to locate nets and fledglings in the grass (NOT EASY!). Around 11 am we called it a day and went back to our cabin in the woods. After some data logging, lunch and a nap I would spend my afternoons riding my bike around town or going cannoning in Lake Pymatuning. To spice life up once or twice a week all the bird researchers would plan evenings out where we could just relax and share stories about our crazy birds and the ridiculous situations we had ended up in trying to get data.
Song Sparrows are ground nesters and the nests are very cryptic. Here you can see a nest with 3 eggs in it.
Around mid June we were wrapping up the study on the game lands so I started up the second part of my study- Do the sparrows exhibit different aggressive tendencies when they hold territories near humans? To do this I conducted the same two experiments, playback and FID, in the nearby towns of Linesville and Conneaut lake, PA. The results were intriguing and I am very excited to finish analyzing my data and report my findings.
A song sparrow egg. No worries the nest had been predated long before I picked up this egg. We had to be very careful not to leave our scent on active nests.
This leads me to the present day I am now doing my data analysis and though it is not as fun or exciting as exploring and tromping around the fields of PA it is defiantly eye opening. I am in the midst of creating maps with Arc GIS and at moments I want to pull my hair out, but there is nothing more exciting right now then seeing a finished map that shows you something you can really work with. I hope (fingers crossed) that by May I will update this and be able to say I am done and I found X, Y and Z. Until then if you are into animal behavior studies and want to talk over some ideas let me know.
An example of an “urban” bird’s territory (left) versus a game land bird’s territory (right).
Freezing or not sometimes you just have to get out and grab some ice cream with friends. Since all the bird researchers shared similar schedules (up at dawn down at dusk) we made time to go out for some R&R at least once a week.