June 2013
Summer is in full swing, and the lab is scattered far and wide. Jenny is in Peru working on her hummingbirds and flowerpiercers. Luke Browne is in Ecuador conducting seed dispersal research in Bilsa Biological Station. Sam Lantz is in Australia working with red-backed fairy-wrens and coordinating our International Research Experience for Students (IRES) project. Erik Enbody has spent time in Australia with Sam learning the ropes and is now in Papua New Guinea working with white-shouldered fairy-wrens. Scott is in Europe advancing his interdisciplinary research. Closer to home, Brock Geary has been working on brown pelicans and other seabirds nesting on Gulf of Mexico barrier islands. Jordan and family have returned from a semester in Brazil, and are gearing up for their first Tropical Biology field course to Ecuador, in August.
This has been a productive few months for the lab. We received a grant from the USFWS ‘Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Act’ program for continued work in Ecuador, and a number of smaller research grants and fellowships. We also had two publications come out, one on flamingo aggression in Zoo Biology (headed up by Mitch Hinton and Anne Bendelow, two Tulane undergraduates) and one on red-backed fairy-wren geographic variation in BMC Evolutionary Ecology, headed up by Dan Baldessarre. Presentations were made at the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation meeting in June in Costa Rica and the Wilson Ornithological Society meetings in May, in Williamsburg VA.
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