In the summer of 2020, Washington University's Tyson Research Center held their summer Undergraduate Fellows Program completely virtually. Among other research skills, we in the Tick & Wildlife Team focused on bird identification.

Each week, we selected a live cam to watch together. 

And we would meet at a specific time to "bird" and chat about the birds we were watching in real time via Slack.

Because we wanted to observe birds in other parts of the world in different time zones, we also selected long recorded live cam segments and played them at the same time while we chatted (e.g., the Allen BirdCam offerings).

We found other live cam platforms to bird from, including:

Houston Audubon: Bolivar Flats Bird Cam 
Littlehouse Prairie Village, Kansas, USA 
Septimo Paraiso Lodge Feeding Platform, Ecuador 

One of our most successful activities was to combine our weekly birding session with our weekly anti-racism in science and conservation training:

​Virtual bird watching in the Monterey Bay Aquarium Aviary for #BlackWomenWhoBird @BlackAFInSTEM

Other tasks we included in our virtual bird id training:
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1. Download and sign up for a Merlin account. Using Merlin, id one bird from your window or backyard.
2. Follow #BirdingWhileBlack on twitter
3. Take the eBird essentials course and read about tips for eBirding from home
4. Read and learn about the differences between eBird Yard, Incidental, and Complete lists.
5. Each day this week try to identify and enter into eBird at least: 1 bird into your yard list and/or 1 "incidental" or
    "complete" list at another (safe, socially distanced) location.
6. At least 3 times this week, go outside with a notebook to a location where you can sit and observe a single individual 
    bird for at least 5 minutes (or until it flies away completely). Spend the first 2-3 minutes just OBSERVING this individual
    bird. Try to get a sense of what it is up to. Then spend a few minutes jotting down some notes, what are the behaviors 
    you observed? What do you think these behaviors mean? What other questions do your observations bring up?
7. Download and work on Thayer's bird quizzes.

We also watched other bird and birding related videos:

Birding Wile Black: A Candid Conversation 
Jason Ward's Birds of North America 
TedGlobal, Washington Wachira: For the love of birds 
TedxAmsterdam, Arjan Dwarshuis: What birdspotting can teach us about conservation 

Listened to podcasts and stories:

BirdNote: House Sparrow (Passer domesticus)
BirdNote: Why Birds Stand on One Leg 
Short Wave - Crows: Are They Scary or Just Scary-Smart?
Ologies: Plumology (FEATHERS) with Dr. Allison Shultz 
Coronavirus Live Updates: Do Those Birds Sound Louder To You? An Ornithologist Says You're Hearing Things 
Ologies: Pelicanology (PELICANS) with Juita Martinez 

Watched webinars associated with our bioacoustics research:

WildLabs Tech Tutors, Carlos Abrahams: How do I perform automated recordings of bird assemblages?
WildLabs Tech Tutors, Tessa Rhinehart: How do I scale up acoustic surveys with AudioMoths and automated processing?
Soundscapes to Landscapes Training Series: Validating Bird Calls 

Of course, nothing beats in-person instruction. But during our end-of-season meetings with each Fellow, they highlighted our group birding sessions as among their favorite activities of the summer. In addition to meeting our learning objectives, our virtual birding expeditions also helped us relax and bond as a group. I highly recommend it!

I have been planning and preparing for over a year to begin studying birds, their predatory behaviors, and their own predation risk, in residential backyards along a gradient of urbanization in the St. Louis metropolitan area, Missouri, USA.

Along with the rest of the world, however, my plans have drastically changed due to COVID-19, and instead I am committed to keeping the curve flat, staying at home, and finding a path forward. I am switching gears to employ a no-contact, socially-distanced, stay-at-home sampling regime. 

My overall research questions remain the same: I am curious how the habitat modifications that residents enrolled in the Bring Conservation Home program have made to their yards (removal of invasive plants, planting natives) influence larger scale patterns in avian functional and phylogenetic diversity. In addition, I am curious how these local features interact with larger scale patterns in urbanization to influence biodiversity. To help me answer these questions, I had selected 63 yards, located along a gradient from highly urbanized areas (e.g., in St. Louis City) to more suburban or rural areas (e.g., in St. Charles and Jefferson counties). A third of the yards have the highest Bring Conservation Home certifications possible (gold or platinum), another third are certified at a lower level (indicating less native cover, more invasive cover; silver), and the final third have not yet been certified (none)⁠--serving as a more typical baseline yard with which to compare. 

11% (caged) to 46% (no cage), and predation increased with increasing proportions of seminatural habitat within 500‐m of orchard transects. Predation also increased as the size and bark furrow depth of walnut trees increased, likely because these characteristics were associated with increasing abundance of avian predators with functional traits specific to consuming tree‐dwelling cocoons (e.g., woodpeckers). The presence and increasing complexity of local margin habitat increased the species richness and abundance of avian predators but was not predictive of cocoon predation. Consistent with intermediate landscape‐complexity hypothesis predictions, the effect size of woodpecker abundance on predation was large in simple landscapes (1–20% seminatural cover) and low in complex landscapes (>20% cover). Contrary to predictions, effect size was large in cleared landscapes (<1% cover), suggesting that orchards supported predators in cleared landscapes, with positive effects on pest reduction. We provide evidence that increasing the abundance of avian predators with traits specific for consuming target pests—by retaining old trees and seminatural cover—can increase orchard pest reduction services in an intensive agricultural region.
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Gave a seminar about my dissertation research and a preview of the urban ecology research I have planned at the weekly seminar series of the Living Earth Collaborative and the Evolution, Ecology, and Population Biology program at Washington University, St. Louis. It was great fun and the audience asked many good questions. Also, the LEC has by far the best snacks of any academic seminar series I have taken part in. 

Read our post here:

Glad to see the word spread on the beneficial services birds can provide to growers!

Hot off the press is a new resource for farmers put together by the Wild Farm Alliance (along with myself and Dr. Sara Kross): Supporting Beneficial Birds and Managing Pest Birds.

Growers are quite aware of the role that a few pest bird species play on their farms, but are often unaware of the beneficial services provided by many birds species, including insect and rodent control. In this guide we summarize results from dozens of ecological studies that have demonstrated significant crop pest reductions by insectivorous and carnivorous birds; in some cases these predatory effects have also been associated with reduced crop damage or improved yield. But ecologists and farmers agree that the story is more complicated than that. In some cases, depending on crop, landscape context, or bird species, the role birds play in reducing pest numbers can be insignificant from the grower perspective, or pest species may have a more damaging effect than do insectivores in having a positive effect. Ecologists are currently quite interested in deciphering this complexity, curious about the conditions under which the predatory effects of birds are most helpful to growers. We are also moving in the direction of trying to determine net outcomes of bird presence on farms. We ask questions about whether the beneficial services outweigh the disservice costs, and under what conditions managers and farmers can tip the balance in the direction of benefits to growers and consumers while also protecting biodiversity.

​The aim of this guide is to distill the current available research into a useful and user-friendly guide for farmers and conservationists alike, with the hope of us all working together to find creative sustainable solutions for conserving biodiversity while also providing humans with the food and fiber we need. 

The full document can be downloaded here.

Baumgartner, J. A., S. Kross, S. Heath, S. Connor. 2019. Supporting beneficial birds and managing pest birds. Wild Farm Alliance.

As an ecologist who has used exclosures (Figure 1) to disentangle interactions among multiple species, I often receive emails with basic questions about exclosure construction, net mesh size, sample size needs, and the like. I typically write up a response describing my own experiences, but have often thought it would be nice to have a publication to refer to --one that could provide insight, warnings, and recommendations garnered from trial and error. When I was a Master's student, I certainly could have used such a resource as I wondered how other researchers handled issues that were never discussed in their publications: has anybody else ever had birds get inside their exclosures? What are the pluses and minuses of a particular mesh size? Does anybody else have issues with predatory spiders camping out on their exclosures? Is PVC the best option?

It appears that a handful of other ecologists have had similar experiences, and Dr. Bea Maas decided to helm the effort to do something about it. The result is our recent collaborative publication in Basic and Applied Ecology  where we discuss methodological insights, potential improvements, and cost-benefit trade-offs of exclosure techniques. ​Our hope is that this will be a useful resource for graduate student and seasoned researchers alike. Head on over to my publications page to request a reprint.

Maas, B., S. Heath, I. Grass, C. Cassano, A. Classen, D. Faria, P. Gras, K. Williams-Guillén, M. Johnson, D. S. Karp, V. Linden, A. Martínez-Salinas, J. Schmack, and S. Kross. 2019. Experimental field exclosure of birds and bats in agricultural systems - methodological insights, potential improvements, and cost-benefit trade-offs. Basic and Applied Ecology 35:1-12.