Week 2 - Spring Quarter

Finally, the protocol we had been developing for weeks is being used. We started this week with a clean-up day. As Kati and I did the clean-up, we began to learn about our transect; we learned about how long this journey would take, which ended up being, for the first time, a bit longer than 2 hours. Time was a bit concerning because I was nervous about how much longer this would take. It was stimulating to find bird carcasses outside engineering two and Earth and Marine Science buildings during our clean-up. The corpses were extremely unrecognizable, but we began to develop our understanding of which buildings were practical culprits in the issue of bird-window collisions. Although the survey took longer than I initially expected, we were also processing the carcasses and inserting data into our google sheet. These data points would not be experimental but anecdotal.

Throughout the week, I was also working on processing and making sure the protocol I created last quarter was understandable. Here I found myself pointing out small mistakes, which I am surprised got through the previous edits but was happy that I was spending time doing. I knew that I would need to increase the understandability of the protocol because just because I think this makes sense does not necessarily mean that more people do. Also, because reproducibility is essential for this study, we need to ensure that future interns' jobs are as easy as possible.

Beyond the clean-up day, we found no bird carcasses. As Kyle was working on the scavenger survey simultaneously, it was interesting to hear that some corpses were being taken from the survey sights and others were not. The birds being taken were at buildings with neither historical nor clean-up anecdotal data.