Cleaning ladies and bouncing balls

This week was all about Great Tits, strangely enough. On Wednesday morning we went out to ‘help’ with catching and ringing the birds. To catch the birds in daylight our field technician Piet uses mist nets. Piet is an amazing man that knows a lot about the Great Tits and has been working with them at Westerheide for decades. Mist nets are nets that are composed of such thin strings that the birds can’t see them and so they fly right into it. Although they end up in the most strange positions (if you do yoga you can make yourself an image), but they are not harmed by it. Of course a lot of different species end up in these nets. In the three times I have seen them being used these last two weeks we had the pleasure of meeting: Greater Spotted Woodpecker, Marsh Tit, Finch, Long-tailed Tit, Blue Tit and European Greenfinch. Oh and we caught some Great Tits too!

The Great Tits that had not been caught before we took to the NIOO for the ‘Exploration Test’ the next morning. In this test we release the bird in a novel room with five artificial ‘trees’ for 2 to 10 minutes. In total 6 birds needed to be tested and I had to learn how to do it. Together with Piet we sit in front of a window (we can see them, they can’t see us) and score the amounts of hops and flights they make. The differences between the birds are remarkable! Ranging from one little lady directly taking place on one of the trees and cleaning herself the next 5 minutes to another bird acting like he had just swallowed a bouncing ball: Tree 1, Tree 2, Wall 2, Ceiling, Door, Floor, Tree 5, Ceiling, Window, Tree 4, Wall 3, Tree 1, Cage Entrance, Tree 3 within 2 minutes (and that is leaving out the hops and jumps to other braches!). At the end of one of the test we have to get in to catch the bird, but before that we have to know where it is. However, when it sits on the floor right in front of the door we can’t see it. So Piet and me both stood up to see if we could find one of the birds and then it suddenly (in the exact same moment) flew in front of the window. Ok, reading it back it does not sound very scary, but in that moment, I can assure you, it was quite scary! No, really! Those little black-yellow birds, sure know how to surprise you. Of course, we also had a little fly-away: our little cleaning lady. The lesson learned: never trust the quiet ones! We could catch her in the hallway with a net and a ladder. The smart little lady was sitting really quiet in one of the corners of the ceiling. If we had not seen her fly over there, I wouldn’t have been surprised if we wouldn’t have found her for hours. That is the nice thing of working really close with your study species, you just learn to respect them so much more!

In the afternoon I also had to learn how to get blood samples. Well if you think the birds are small, try looking at the veins! But as Piet nicely put it: “The second bird went very well”. No worries, that afternoon all birds were released back in good health in the forest where they came from.

One more thing (as I am already over 550 words again): www.beleefdelente.nl!!! This amazing site created by Vogelbescherming Nederland, will go live again from March 1 onwards. With webcams you can spy on the breeding ecology of 11 Dutch birds. Of course the Great Tit will also be there. Peter de Vries, a colleague of mine at the NIOO, will keep a journal for the Great Tits on the website and I will be the Great Tit Classroom Expert for the Junior version of the site: www.beleefdelentejunior.nl. This means that once a week I will be chatting with kids from primary schools so they can ask all kinds of questions to me about the Great Tits and I can overload them with fun facts about why Great Tits (together with Barnacle Geese of course) are the most awesome birds. It is so very rewarding that I can contribute a little bit to the understanding, respect and protection of our Dutch breeding birds. Yes, I am an idealist. Sue me!

Cutting Edge Ecology

Everytime I think about how long I have been a PhD student, and I realize it has only been 3 (official) weeks, it feels unreal. It feels like I have been working here for, well 4 weeks, at least! And I mean that in a very good way.
So what has happened this last week? It takes some effort to remember because I have been celebrating Carnaval this weekend. It is hard not to act as a biologist during Carnaval. Observing all the interesting social interactions happening around me, you realize that concepts like epp and epc are not specific for non-human animals. And one of the best moments of Carnaval was arriving at home in the middle of the night and seeing a barn owl fly past just a few meters away from me. Right in front of my home! So you see, biology is there at all times, you just have to look around you, especially at night!
Btw I also did something useful this weekend, working at the bird shelter. Although my work this weekend was mostly about hedgehogs. Cleaning their cages, weighing and feeding them (they love meal worms!). Especially during weighing I noticed how different they really are from one another. While one stays rolled up in a ball, the other one acts like having the equilevant of ADHD. All this happening while budgerigar and two goldfinches are having a singing contest with eachother and a chicken is moonwalking next to me (they love meal worms too!).
But I was doing a PhD.. This week I joined one of the excursions of the Ecology of Animal Life History course (really great course!) to my study field. While my promotor was talking about how to study fitness, bird song and feeding behaviour in great tit populations, my co-promotor was talking about how he had never eaten one of the birds. I guess, just like in great tits and hedgehogs, also within the species of promotors there are differences..
A girl, named Maaike, also started her PhD with great tits February 1st. She studies the influence of light on their behaviour. Last Friday she spent all day trying to contact the man from Phillips to arrange the lights for the project. Her promotor told me that was the first test of a PhD was: getting lights from Phillips. For my project you can say the same about the tags and base-stations. My promotor arranged about a year ago that everything should have arived by now. But our postboxes still look very empty.. Everytime something else seems to malfunction in the 'final' test. It is the challenge of working on the cutting edge of ecology with a new technology. But the reward of doing something different than everybody else has been doing until that moment will be great! 

Alaaf!!

Why ecology is awesome!

Last week was full of exciting stuff again, but I want to emphasize two of them:

The first, the NERN meeting, is the annual Dutch ecology convention. I was there last Tuesday, just like about everyone in the Netherlands and Belgium who has something to do with Ecology research. From the first minute I walked in, the level of "Hey, you are also here?!" was enormous. Most people were there to make people enthousiastic about their research by presenting a poster, a talk or both. My promoter and and copromoter both had a talk and, of course, I was there to listen. However, not next year my promoter told me after his talk. Apparently his presentation was a warm-up for the talk I am going to give next year. Nice! But, there will be a lot of competition of other very interesting ecology studies going on in and outside the Netherlands. Luckily though, none are so interesting as mine.
The feel of such a convention is so nice, like a little sub-universe with only ecologists. And the best thing is.. I am part of it! The day was closed by a talk from Frank Berendse about the Dutch nature policy. People who follow me on Facebook know that I have a little bit of interest in that topic. But there was more. Namely, books! Well, I should not exaggerate, one book. Yes, I bought a book. Again. Frank Berendse wrote a very beautiful book about nature in the Netherlands and as a total groupie I got it signed too :)! 

So how about the second thing. This was the forest field test, that this week actually took place in an actual forest. Ok. I will admit that I was not totally and utterly filled with enthousiasm to go out in the forest with this cold. But, once I was there it was wonderful! The snow cover revealed all the tracks of the forest inhabitants. In the corner of your eyes, more than rarely, you could see a rabbit jump away. Walking further inside the forest sometimes the smell of a fox sneaked up on you. Did it just recently pass by? Or maybe it was in the burrow beneath me? And the birds were singing loud and flying around high in the tops of the trees. The forest was alive, and the life was visible, smelly, hearable and feelable (I don't care if this is not a word). Ahh fieldwork, you never get closer with your research than during those days, the days you are out there, in nature.

“There are no words, no paints to express all this, only a beautiful dumbness in the soul, life speaking to life.”  (Emily Carr)

"1, 2, 3, testing, testing"

Just to get it over with, I study "The role of personality in the social networks of Great Tits". Great Tits, in this case, are birds! Also known as 'koolmees'. We are going to use a new radiotrack system in which we do not have to run with a Yagi-antenna after the birds like crazy people. No, we have 'base stations' that will be spread around in the forest and will log all the information of tags coming near them. At the end of the day we will visit all the base stations and collect the information. Birds with a known 'exploration' score will be fitted with a radio tag and so we hope that we will be able to relate 'personality' (exploration can be used as proxy for personality, there are tons of papers about it, read them) with spacial use.
Sound good right? But as we use a new system 'Encounternet', it will have to be tested first. Formula's for location estimates have to be developed and location estimates can be influences by several things: density of base stations, objects obstructing the signals (aka trees), distance to the base node, etc. So we (me and my three MSc students) started out with a trial on campus, just to entertain the working people, not because the Prof was sick and we had a shortage in cars to get to the forest. Everything we do in science is because we planned it that way! Never forget that.
Under the watchful eye of a little Robin, we set out the base stations and GPS mapped them. We checked the check-list twice, so we have everything. Or maybe not. Apperantly we need tags for this test.. To make them look like birds we mounted them on wooden sticks (don't ask). Everything seemed to go well, until we noticed that the Campus Gardening departement decided they wanted to trim the trees on our test field. And they needed a tractor to do this. For a little backgrount info: our base stations are not very visible. We noticed that during the trial when we walked passed them a significant number of times (some aspects of the trial still need to be improved). So when I saw the tractor making its way to base station number 307 a lot of things went through my mind (that I will not discuss in public), but I do not think I have run that fast a lot of times in my life.
We managed to save everything in tact and ended up having a nice talk with the gardners about what the hell we were doing, why and most importantly: what is the use? It is always fun to explain why scientists do what they do and how that could be of any relevance. Not sure if I made a very convincing speech about why we should be very interested in the social networks of Great Tits, besides the fact that it is just really really interesting!, but they seemed satisfied with my answer (or they just let the crazy people be).
Next week I am going to visit my first official conference as PhD student in Lunteren (you have to start small). The rest of the week will be about meeting people, discussing papers, trying to get GPX data into XML format and doing a trial in the forest (Its always good to plan things without assuming we will freeze to death). So much excitement again to come!

PS I have not figured out yet how to do the English spelling check.