Humans are good at adapting!

The REU Experience:

In the summer of 2019, I was very lucky to have the privilege of participating in the Research Experiences for Undergraduates program (REU). This incredible opportunity gives just a few students each summer the privilege of gaining some vital early-career experience doing research in a field of their choice. I applied for the section called REU Raptor, which is based on Boise State University campus in Idaho, where nine students from across the world came to gain valuable skills in studying birds of prey, such as hawks, owls, and vultures.

The Boise State University campus stands very close to the Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area. Most students in the program had projects focusing on raptors that lived in the desert grassland habitat of the Conservation Area lands, including Barn Owls (Tyto alba), Burrowing Owls (Athene cunicularia), and Ferruginous Hawks (Buteo regalis). My project was different. It was much more intensive and involved chasing an elusive, secretive forest raptor: the Northern Goshawk (Accipiter gentilis).

 

My mentor, Rob Miller, took a small team and me to the southern divisions of the Sawtooth National Park, hours away from Boise State. Our study area stands on the borders of Utah, Idaho, and Nevada. Goshawks prefer the mountains and often nest on relatively steep slopes. While most of the REU students worked in the office, I hiked the Sawtooths with a chunky “game caller” audio player in hand to play goshawk calls in the hopes of getting a response from the territorial adults. We were undertaking another year of work toward our long-term goal to count every goshawk in the Sawtooth National Forest, band any that had not been identified before, and take blood samples for use in several other ongoing studies.

 

My assigned project was to record the survival and dispersal of fledgling goshawks once they left the nest. Our study area is an unusual one. The goshawks that live here feed mostly on Belding’s ground squirrels during the nesting season (Urocitellus beldingi; about 75% of total biomass consumed in some nests according to my mentor), while those in other places are primarily bird predators. Almost as soon as the young goshawks in our forests are old enough to leave the nest, the ground squirrels estivate, effectively going into a summer-through-spring hibernation belowground, becoming completely inaccessible to the hawks. At this point, we believe that the majority of the young birds starve to death. This is important because it affects what the breeding females will do next year. If they consider the breeding season a failure because their young died, they may not return to the same place ever again. I put small backpack GPS transmitters on the young birds once they left the nest to see where they went and what they died of.

Unfortunately, science is rarely a straightforward process. Almost nothing goes as planned in field situations. My REU year turned out to be the worst breeding year for goshawks that my mentor had ever seen. We scoured the mountains for weeks and found very few birds. It was tiring, long-winded work with no goshawk sightings to brighten things up. There were fifty territories to search through, fifty places where birds could have been nesting, and we only found a total of four breeding pairs. Only the very toughest of individuals in the best-quality habitats were able to raise young that year.

 

As a result of the poor season, there were only around seven young birds alive at the time of fledging. We decided not to perform our fledgling mortality study. The circumstances were too unusual and threatened to bias our results. Also, we would have been required to put the backpack transmitters on the entire cohort to gather any useful data, which would have meant using the entire cohort of the year as our sample. We didn’t want the transmitters to negatively affect their ability to survive during an apparently already-difficult year, either. With less than half of the time left, we needed a new one ASAP.

 

Fortunately, the spring of 2019 saw some impressive amounts of rain and unusually cool temperatures. Rob was suspicious that the cold, soggy weather was to blame for the poor breeding success of the year. These unusual circumstances provided exactly what we needed to change my project into a weather study. We had breeding data from nine years of fieldwork, and weather data was easy to find online from years of recorded satellite info. We compared the two data sets and, as we had suspected, we found that the weather was closely correlated with our observed breeding data. We had discovered a connection.

 

The final task of the program was to present our projects at the Idaho Conference for Undergraduate Research at Boise State University. Although our initial research plan had collapsed around our ears, we had still managed to come out on top with all the vital findings we needed. I presented a rudimentary first-draft version of the work I had done. But the adventure wasn’t over.

 

A couple of weeks after returning home, I got a call from Rob. He wasn’t quite ready to call an end to the project. Unlike my initial fledgling study, our new project contained nine years of strong data and was perfectly substantial in its findings. Rob thought we might be able to publish it.

And so, almost a year after my REU experience first began, as goshawk field season begins and Rob heads out to the Sawtooths once more, our manuscript is sitting on the desk of the editor for the Journal of Raptor Research. If all goes well, we could be published in one of the most prestigious bird-of-prey journals out there.

 

 

The Take-Away:

As it turns out, I was lucky to learn these lessons about being a “real” scientist so early on. Every researcher in the world, whether they’ve experienced struggles like mine or not, is now faced with the challenges of dealing with the new great disruptor of all plans far and wide: the COVID-19 pandemic. The whole world has nearly come to a halt as the virus threatens our safety. The progress of many fields in science is being held back, too. Within the wildlife biology field alone, many (if not most) researchers have had their projects postponed and their work held stagnant as humanity waits for the storm to pass.

For example, Ron, my REU mentor’s plans to do woodpecker surveys for the US Forest Service have been completely scrapped for the year. Researchers tracking elk and deer populations in Idaho have been told to stay home. I volunteered at the end of last semester to help with a research project headed by Dr. Rebecka Brasso, which will examine mercury levels in spiders and brine flies from Antelope Island. Plans to collect spiders this summer dangled by a thread during the lockdown, and have only recently been allowed to start again, with safety protocols in place to protect against Coronavirus of course. Some states have allowed only a few “essential” research projects to go on, such as the monitoring of Northern Goshawk populations. Others have canceled everything altogether. For many researchers, the loss of this year’s data will be difficult.

Coping with the new normal has not been easy for many, many people. On top of declined research, as we know, jobs were lost, people were (and are) alone, and the economy is still trying to pick itself up again. In a time of uncertainty, when much of the world seems to still be in limbo, the best we can do is keep moving. As COVID upsets every plan ever laid on the planet, we are faced with the challenge of being more adaptive and flexible than ever before. It is essential that we do so.

 

Eventually, if history has taught us anything, the COVID storm will pass, even if it takes a few years. Life as we know it will continue, but it is going to change. New plans must be made with modifications to ensure the safety of all people involved. As for research, new protocols will be established and some projects may be required to adjust their entire scope in order to continue. Some researchers, completely separated from their work by state or other regulations, have started looking for opportunities to work in other ways. For example, the deer and elk researchers in Idaho and surrounding states who were banned from entering the field this year have turned to work on my REU mentor’s Short-Eared Owl project, instead. Rob is grateful for the extra help, and the folks who would have been stuck twiddling their thumbs for months now have a chance to get outside and do what they love.

 

So what is left for researchers and students in general? What remains is to plow on with life from a completely novel angle, bending without breaking, learning and growing while we weather the storm. Humans are good at adapting. It is part of what made our species so successful when we first stepped “out of Africa” in some primeval world long ago. We can adapt to a modern pandemic world, too.

 

 

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