Here are a series of images I shot during the course of a summer day in Vancouver. All are hymenopterans, which, in addition to being tasty, are of course the best insects out there.
Search Results for: red throated caracara
Defending my PhD thesis
Thursday morning last week was a pretty special day; it was the day I defended my PhD thesis. For those of you who don’t know, a thesis defence is a formal examination, wherein the candidate (me) gives a public seminar on their thesis, and then is questioned by an examining committee, generally composed of their supervisory committee, plus an internal and external examiner, and all headed by a chairperson selected by the department.
My examining committee was headed by Dr. Margo Moore, who did a great job keeping the event rolling and the atmosphere relaxed. Dr. David Lank was my internal examiner, a great guy I have always gone to with questions on bird research (we do not have a lot of institutional experience to draw on in a chemical ecology lab). My external examiner was Dr. Keith Bildstein, a researcher at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, with decades of experience in raptor research and in particular experience studying Striated Caracaras in the Falkland Islands and Patagonia. My advisory committee consisted of Dr. Sean O’Donnell, who was absent for the defence, but there in spirit (he is doing fieldwork in Costa Rica), Dr. Ron Ydenberg, an expert in bird foraging behaviour, and of course my supervisor Dr. Gerhard Gries.
I gave my 40 minute presentation, outlining my research on Red-throated Caracaras, focusing on several aspects of their biology:
After the defence, we had lunch with teh committee, and then went to Trout Lake for a bit of a celebration. Here are some shots from the defence and the after-party. I know I have missed some important faces (Gerhard and Regine and Keith Bildstein!), but I hope you will forgive me, as I was just feeling relief!
Article in the Bulletin of the ESC published!
Wow! Are those rays of glory coming out of my browser window? Yes! Yes they are! It all happened when I loaded up my latest article on Red-throated Caracara biology! It was published in the March edition of the Bulletin of the Entomological Society of Canada, and gives an exciting entomological overview of my research with these loud and amazing birds. So head on over and check it out, and while you are there, check out the rest of the awesome entomological content as well.
A strategic withdrawal from the field
The last fieldtrip north of Gualaco to map out caracara habitats had a couple of interesting effects on our planning. The first was that Catherine injured her knee from all the walking over rough terrain, and found that last weekend she could barely walk around the apartment. This is not an ideal condition for fieldwork, and will require at least several weeks to heal.
The second thing we realized is just how difficult the terrain will be for doing VHF tracking of caracaras for home range estimation. From our interviews with the local people, it would seem that the caracaras’ range is upward of 6 square kilometres at minimum, and hence our daily tracking success will depend heavily on luck rather than getting good early bearings on our tagged birds. In addition, the initial capture is expected to be much more difficult, because of how long we will need to wait at a capture site before having any hope of seeing caracaras nearby.
All of these factors have led us to re-plan the fieldwork, such that we will return to Canada for several weeks, and return in mid-to late March for the onset of the breeding season. This will also allow us to finish writing tasks that we have had much difficulty with here (there is no power for computing out where we work). In our absence, Isidro Zuniga will continue a biweekly field program of searching out other caracara groups, and marking their locations for later attention.
The caracaras here in Honduras are at severely reduced levels. Whereas once they were very common, they are now so scarce that most people have not ever seen one. By way of example, last week we walked 54 kilometres, this week 56 km, and encountered caracaras but once. Over a similar distance in French Guiana, I would have expected to encounter caracaras 15-20 times. The birds here seem to have much much greater home range sizes than those in French Guiana, perhaps because they are unconstrained by the territoriality of neighbouring groups, or maybe because the density of food (social wasps) is much lower here. Either way, it makes for some difficult realities for fieldwork. Getting sufficient sample size for home range estimation using VHF radio tracking will be extremely difficult, if not impossible. It will certainly not take place over the optimistic schedule I had budgeted for this work.
So when we return, we would like to have in place some further funding to secure an alternative tracking technology, such as GPS or satellite tags; with these at least we could be reasonably sure to get some usable data. We will also focus on the nest monitoring phase of the study, assuming we can find some active nests. This is also expected to be physically demanding work, but at least with nest cameras other fieldwork can be pursued simultaneously.
I will write another post about what we did see on the second field trip, but for now we must concentrate on getting ready to go. Don’t worry, this is not the end, it is only the beginning.
Going to Honduras!
Things have been rather quiet here at Ibycter lately, with less in the way of Weekend Expedition posts and no Cheapskate Tuesday posts for a while. The reason for this is that Catherine and I are getting ready to make a trip to Honduras to do a preliminary conservation study on Red-throated Caracaras.
If you remember from back in June, the Honduran Conservation Coalition found and monitored a nest site in the Olancho Department, and they believe there is still a sizable population of caracaras nearby. I have wanted to work on Red-throated Caracara conservation biology for a long time, as no formal study has been done on the conservation of these birds in Central America. They are in steep decline across the region, and have disappeared from Mexico and Guatemala.
I was invited by Mark Bonta to come and do some research on these birds, and so, because I had funding from the National Birds of Prey Trust to do conservation research, I informed them of a change in venue to the heart of the region where caracaras are declining. We have since secured some more funds from the Zoo Conservation Outreach Group, as well as a private donor, and so we will be going to implement the start of the project.
This project will see us engaging the local volunteers and researchers to help us determine home range sizes and habitat occupancy of caracaras in the forests near Gualaco. We will do radio tracking of birds from various caracara groups in the area, and will hopefully be able to get a preliminary estimate of home range size. We will also do call-playback surveys of the forests in order to determine the numbers of groups occupying the area. A third objective is to make further documentation of nesting behavior and food habits of the caracaras, as this is relatively unknown for the region.
Anyway, we ship off Monday, and will arrive in Tegucigalpa on Tuesday. After that we will be guided around the region and introduced to the stakeholders and collaborators. This is my very first field research conducted outside the bounds of a research camp, so making sure that everything is in order is a bit stressful.
We hope, however to continue to blog both here, at Catherine’s SpiderBytes blog and also at the ESC blog about all the cool stuff we encounter and the process of doing exploratory field research.
Publications
an asterisk (*) indicates full text is available free of charge on this or another site. For those not available, email me!
*McCann, S., Moeri, O., Ibarra Jimenez, S., Scott, C., & Gries, G. (2015). Developing a paired-target apparatus for quantitative testing of nest defense behavior by vespine wasps in response to con- or heterospecific nest defense pheromones, Journal of Hymenoptera Research 46: 151-163
*McCann, S., Moeri, O., Jones, T., & Gries, G. G. (2014). Black-throated Antshrike preys on nests of social paper wasps in central French Guiana.Revista Brasileira de Ornitologia-Brazilian Journal of Ornithology, 22(3), 300-302. {supplemental video}
*McCann, S.., Moeri, O., Jones, T., Scott, C., Khaskin, G., Gries, R., O’Donnell, S., and Gries, G. (2013). Strike Fast, Strike Hard: The Red-Throated Caracara Exploits Absconding Behavior of Social Wasps during Nest Predation. PLOS-ONE 8:e84114.
Going to Guelph!
Due to an unexpected change for our plans for a scouting/survey mission to Honduras, Catherine and I have suddenly found ourselves in a position to attend the Entomological Society of Canada/Entomological Society of Ontario Joint Annual Meeting in Guelph! I am not sure that our abstracts will be fit in for talks, but I sure hope so. If not I will probably bring a really cool poster. In celebration, I walked outside the lab, and what should I find but a handsome Western Conifer Seed Bug, Leptoglossus occidentalis, a species that our lab has studied in the past. Seems like these bugs have infrared sensors built into their abdomens that allow them to find the relatively hot maturing conifer cones on which they feed. This time of year, adults are seeking warmer sheltered locations in which to overwinter, and since they can’t go to Honduras, they often come indoors. I found this one perched on a still-warm hood of a delivery van outside.
Consider this blog post fair warning then, my eastern comrades, that like the Western Conifer Seed Bug, we are coming to Ontario in numbers, ready to rock your socks with some BC-style sciencing!
Weekend Expedition 30: A day off in Stanley Park
It has been a busy couple weeks here in Vancouver, preparing manuscript revisions for an upcoming paper and writing grant proposals for upcoming fieldwork. They way it is looking now, I may soon be travelling to Honduras in the fall for a 3 week expedition to survey for Red-throated Caracaras and Scarlet Macaws in a remote region of Olancho. This trip will also be to familiarize myself with the terrain, meet the local conservationists and researchers, and get rolling on some permitting issues pertaining to future fieldwork. This is an exciting development for species and habitat conservation, as well as for my harebrained scheme to continue research on my favourite loud birds!
Anyway, with all the excitement, it has been tough to find time to go out to shoot, but that is exactly what I did yesterday, hanging out in Stanley Park, and seeing what the late summer had to offer.
Six months of loud birds, photography and science!
Wow! It has already been 6 months since I have been blogging here at Ibycter! I started this blog on January 17th with three posts, and have kept up a pace of roughly three posts per week since that time, with two regular features, the Weekend Expedition and Cheapskate Tuesday. Midweek, I usually post some find I make during the week, or perhaps a more in-depth article on some aspect of Red-throated Caracara biology or tropical fieldwork. I have plans to expand these in-depth articles, as well as the midweek finds, especially as we are in the full swing of insect season here in Vancouver.
Here at Ibycter, I have the amazing ability to see exactly what works well, by seeing the view counts for each post. Here is a rundown of the top 5 posts by view count, followed by three posts I thought did not get enough attention.
Posts You Liked
5. Cheapskate Tuesday 10: the Monster Macro Rig A full how-to about my regular light setup for use with a 100 mm macro lens.
4. Schrödinger’s Grant: This lighthearted piece was Catherine’s name for the limbo that is waiting on results of a grant proposal.
3. How not to make money off a viral story: A simple and old story of copyright infringement of images of a large mosquito.
2. Found: Red-legged Frog on Burnaby Mountain : Sometimes, when writing under the fluorescent lights in the lab gets to be too much, I head out to the woods of Burnaby Mountain to see what I can see. This time I found a less-than common frog.
1. What to expect when your Cellar Spider is Expecting: sometimes the best wildlife stories are close to home!
Posts I liked
3: The Red-throated Caracara: Introducing my favourite loud bird: the overview you were waiting for.
2. Snakes!! A bit about snakes in the rainforest.
1. Ever meet a treetrunk spider? How a beautiful spider got from the forests of French Guiana to our basement suite wall.
So there you have it, Ibycter‘s 6 month blogiversary, and my first roundup post. Please let me know what you liked and didn’t like about these last 6 months, and what you would like to see for the future.
Schrödinger’s Grant
When one applies for a grant to fund research, or any other activity, the success or failure of that grant application cannot be known until the email or letter comes in, either confirming funding or denying it. For this reason, one’s proposed research can be described as both funded and not funded, until that dreadful email comes in and the wave function collapses. This paradox, formulated by Catherine Scott in an effort to cheer me up, shall hereby be referred to as Schrödinger’s Grant (inspired as it is by the famous thought-experiment of Erwin Schrödinger).
Of four grants I have applied for in the past year to fund further research on the Red-throated Caracara, one has been funded, two have been denied, and the fourth is in this state of limbo.
This is a fine way to think of things, and one can always be optimistic, but is it really wise to pin one’s future on such unpredictable events? Sometimes it seems the height of foolishness.
Of course, in the Many Worlds interpretation of grant funding, there exists a possible universe where Red-throated Caracara research is a top priority and ALL the grants are funded, the Nat Geo special is watched by millions and I have a full time job doing tropical research…