Round Robin

We would be remiss if we didn’t stop this week to remember the great artist and naturalist Roger Tory Peterson, inventor of the field mark, granddad of modern birding, born 100 years ago on Thursday.

Peterson’s centennial is being met with great fanfare, including a fancy new edition of the Peterson field guide, a lavish biography, blog tributes, and free birthday cake at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute.

Living Bird editor Tim Gallagher offers a remembrance in our summer issue (on the coffee tables of Lab members now; coming online in October) and recalls how it was RTP himself who suggested the magazine’s name.

So blow out a candle or two for the great man, raise a toast to the bird conservation movement he helped begin - and then get out there and see if you can find some confusing fall warblers. Happy birding everyone.

(Image: Peterson’s Yellow-bellied Sapsucker [1977], from the Lab’s collection)

Two weeks, 16 posts, and 6,000 words later, my 2008 meeting season is over. The ISBE conference ended for me at Steve Lima’s discussion of whether Norway rats can stay alert while they’re sleeping - “perhaps appropriate for the last talk of a very long meeting,” the session moderator noted.***

Biology meetings tend to be held at the end of summer, after northern-hemisphere biologists have finished their field seasons but before the crush of the new semester begins. Now, the ISBE crowds are flitting back to university halls around the world, stowing their chest waders, brush chaps, and sun hats; dusting off lesson plans, welcoming a new crop of students, and - for graduate students - resuming that long battle toward a finished thesis.

I’m making my way back to my cubicle on the second floor of the Lab of Ornithology, to get back to projects I left two weeks ago. I’ll also be assembling my notes and figuring out which few of the hundreds of stories I’ve heard will turn into stories for BirdScope, Living Bird, and our website.

As always, we’d love to hear your suggestions. Is there anything I covered that left you wanting to hear more? Any teasers that you want to hear the punch line to? Or perhaps you spent the whole time wondering when I’d get around to your favorite branch of science or conservation, and I never did. Consider this your invitation to sit in on our editorial meetings and vote for your favorite stories.

And finally, thanks again to everyone who has made this blog part of your daily or weekly routine. We’re glad you’re here.

(Image: Sooty Terns and Brown Noddies, by eBird’s Chris Wood)

***This is not the same thing as sleeping with one eye open, I learned. That’s a talent that belongs mainly to birds, plus dolphins and whales, but not to land mammals. And it’s not a myth - one hemisphere of the brain actually goes to sleep while the other stays awake.

4:30 p.m. I agree: Adelie Penguins just look adorably hopeless when they totter around on the snow. But don’t underestimate their tenacity - or their hiking skills, as Grant Ballard, of the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, showed today.

In March 2000, the world’s largest iceberg broke off the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. It was larger than the island of Jamaica, and suddenly it was loose, drifting westward toward Ross Island (at about 70 miles long, considerably smaller than Jamaica).

By the time Iceberg B-15 arrived it had broken apart, but the three main pieces still rivaled the size of small European countries. A 100-mile-long fragment grated to a halt in the shallows off Ross’s easternmost point, Cape Crozier. Typical ocean currents were diverted, and Ross Island froze into the ice for the next five years straight.

A lesser penguin might lose hope at the prospect of trudging across an endless expanse of ice to reach its traditional breeding grounds. Not Ross Island’s roughly 400,000 breeding Adelie Penguins. Most persevered, and some penguins walked across more than 40 miles of ice to reach the most distant of their nesting colonies, a hunk of pillowy black lava called Cape Royds. And though very few penguins were able to raise young with such a lengthy commute, when the iceberg and surrounding sea ice cleared in 2006, their endurance paid off.

Penguins who survived the “iceberg years” at tiny Cape Royds, which had been so far from open water, found themselves with more krill and fish than they could eat. And hardly any predators (such as South Polar Skuas and leopard seals) took the trouble to raid such a small group. Nest success improved, and the colony started to grow again.

In general, times are good for Adelie Penguins on Ross Island - site of the southernmost open water in the world, Ballard said. Climate isn’t changing nearly as quickly there as it is on the Antarctic Peninsula, halfway around Antarctica and 1,000 miles farther north. There, rapid warming seems to be proving too much for Adelie Penguins. Their colonies are shrinking as northern relatives called Chinstrap Penguins move in.

Ballard jokingly described chinstraps as “scared of sea ice.” A 12-year Antarctic veteran, Ballard has an extremely high regard for Adelies’ hardiness and less for the penguins of warmer climes. Let’s all hope for (and work toward) a world that stays cold enough for both species to thrive.

(Image: Chris Linder/WHOI. Believe it or not, both Ballard and I were just to the left of the frame in this picture. Read more here. And here.)

Most scientific meetings are so huge there’s no choice but to hold them deep in the bowels of some oversized hotel in some major city.

The ISBE meetings are a breath of fresh air. They’re taking place on Cornell’s campus, in the height of a glorious upstate New York summer. Walks to the meeting take you beneath green sugar maples ringing with cicadas, and footbridges span mossy limestone chasms.

Scientific talks are given in auditoriums of adjacent buildings, rather than right next door to each other in identical convention rooms. The meeting planners, led by the Lab’s Dr. Sandra Vehrencamp,  built in 5 minutes of travel time between talks (just barely enough, it turns out).

It makes for a more civilized pace: only three talks per hour instead of four, plus a brief period of reflection – kind of a palate cleanser – before diving into the details of another study.  And the hallways are quieter because they’re not jammed with all 1,000 meeting participants. If someone sneaks in late to a talk, there’s no noise to bleed into the lecture halls.

The talks themselves are different. The speakers hail from 45 countries, and because they work on all sorts of animals (not just birds), they often spend the first few minutes of their talk emphasizing the broad applicability of their research to theory. That helps make the talks interesting even when the animals under study sound like a Monty Python skit in the making.

A few examples: defensive tactics of the Caribbean spiny lobster; group decision-making in the naked mole-rat, space use of subterranean rodents, “lovesickness” in sagebrush crickets, and cross-dressing in the Ruff.

This afternoon: half a million penguins and one very large iceberg.

(Note: Alex would still like to hear your suggestions about All About Birds - see previous post.)

5:45 p.m. The final talk has just ended, and the feeling rippling through the Portland Hilton Tower is not unlike the last day of eighth grade. Professors, postdocs, and grad students spill into the hallways, bumping into old friends they hadn’t run into yet, even though it’s the last day.

A tremendous burbling winds up the escalators and into the atrium, where everyone talks at once about incubation strategies, single nucleotide polymorphisms, and where they’re going for dinner. The hotel’s weekend arrivals are already here, organizing their luggage in the lobby - a wedding party in khaki shorts; vacationers in business casual. They see the horde of sun-weathered biologists ascending the stairs, and head for the elevators.

Hugs are exchanged; reunions planned. People recap their favorite talks and float ideas for collaboration, or flop in leather armchairs looking worn out. More than one distinguished professor eyes the cash bar.

Graduate students in plaid shirts and grimy caps, t-shirts and technical sandals, make resolutions about setting up a long-term research project like Rosemary Grant’s, in the Galapagos, or Peter Arcese’s, off Vancouver Island. Everyone has that intent look that comes from keeping a lot of new information in their minds for just a little longer than they thought they were capable of. Then they head off to the banquet, and let the ideas fall where they may.

Just in the last nine hours, I’ve witnessed murder by cowbird; discovered that mosquitoes breeding in gas-well ponds are making sage-grouse sick with West Nile virus; learned about mercury contamination in Tree Swallows and Red-eyed Vireos; heard that songbirds carry surprising amounts of bird flu (don’t worry, not the virulent kind); watched the results of Project FeederWatch in tracking West Nile virus in Illinois and Michigan; met some feather mites with a sweet tooth for preening oil, and been persuaded by Lab director John Fitzpatrick that we have better things to do with our time than worry about the exact definition of a subspecies.

That was before lunch. The afternoon brought discussions of wind-power turbines’ effect on birds, followed by how to count birds using radar and night-vision goggles. The Lab’s Fuller Evolutionary Biology professor, Irby Lovette, delivered some bad news about using small regions of DNA to estimate something called “heterozygosity.” Cheryl Sesler, of the University of Tennessee at Martin, announced that Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers seem to have wood-digesting bacteria in their guts, much like termites, cows, and ostriches, except none of those species fly across the Gulf of Mexico twice a year. And then Ken Dial, of the University of Montana, gave some closure to the meeting by explaining how he thinks flight evolved in the first place.

Perhaps I’m just light-headed from blood loss (I joined some 200 attendees who gave blood in a UCLA study to examine whether people who handle birds show any exposure to bird flu) but I think that’s enough new ideas for one week. Did I mention that next week, in Ithaca, is the meeting of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology?

Thanks to everyone for reading and commenting. I’ve had a blast.