Kristal & the Junco
 
About Myself
Name: Kristal Cain    
University: Indiana University
Program: Ecology, Evolution & Behavior
Contact me
Email: caink at indiana.edu
The Mantra
If it’s not one thing
it another
The blog
ww-junco.blogspot.com
For a blow by blow, day by day, account of the triumphs, trials and tribulations of my season
 
 
Adventures in field biology
Background: Let me set the stage. My advisor has been conducting research on the dark-eyed junco for over 25 years. Consequently, we know a lot about these little guys. I’m interested in how different ecology’s lead to difference in behavior and physiology, so i decided to go look at a different subspecies with a very different ecology. The sub-species we’ve done the most work with is found in the Appalachian Mts. in Virginia. It is very moist, very cool, very high levels of nest predation. The sub-species I'm looking at, the White-winged junco, breeds in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Here the weather is very erratic, cold and storming one minute, scorching and dry the next. At the start we know very little about these birds. What little we do know is based on work done in the early sixties. So almost anything and everything we find out is adding to our knowledge of these bird’s life histories. My research: I am using the White-winged junco to try and get at the evolutionary and ecological basis of variation in reproductive traits (including behavior, physiology and morphology) between individuals, populations and sub-species. More simply put, how and what do animals in different environments change in order to be successful at reproduction. We know a tremendous amount about what makes a bird successful in an eastern sub-species of the junco, but they live somewhere much cooler and wetter. How do these, and other, differences in ecology, lead to differences in the way the birds look and act. To get at these we catch as many birds as we can, take a ton of measurements on each one and then release them and monitor them for the summer. We also try to find as many nests as we can and track the nest for success or failure. This summer is the first of many for me, and I’m already looking forward to next year. To get an idea of how much variation there is in the sub-species in general we've been working in four different areas of the Black Hills. More specifically, I’m interested in how morphological characters, like the amount of white they have on their tails or wings, correlates with physiological characters, like how much Testosterone they are capable of producing, and if these things correlate with behaviors, like how many nests they father young in. We know this is the case in the eastern sub-species but the white-wings have a lot more white on them so we're excited to see if this holds true here as well. I'm also examining the effect of the hormones mother's put into eggs. I'm trying to determine how these effect the young birds as they grow and begin reproducing themselves. And testing a technique that may let us use digit ratios as a proxy for the hormonal environment.