Week 3 & 4 - Spring Quarter

Besides learning a lot about each other (the interns) and seeing a ton of Junco

Nests, our goals were incomplete for this portion of the survey. We found no bird carcasses! We spent most of our time wondering why we weren’t finding bird carcasses and thinking about the Dark-Eyed Junco nests growing before our eyes. Given that I spent a lot of the internship doing the fieldwork, it was cool to get the chance to see the chicks grow. They went from looking like an unrecognizable species into a juvenile junco. Of course, this is how all growth works but watching it over x amount of days seemed like magic. I wondered why the Juncos chose spots near buildings. These nests were along our routes of searching for bird carcasses. We found nests at Engineering 2, Earth and Marine Sciences, McHenry – all somewhere close to or around a window and wall of a building. They almost always hid within the brush. Most of us have a story of finding the nest because as we walked the perimeter of the building, doing the protocol, one of the Junco parents would fly away and then start screaming at us. Note for future bird-window collisions interns: always walk extremely slow while doing the surveys; you’ll never know what you’ll find.

These few weeks made me feel proud of myself. I knew what I had to do and how to do it. I set myself up for success. We missed no days in the survey. And I was consistently communicating with a group of highly supportive interns and mentors that helped with my problem solving throughout the quarter. The scheduling concept I had for the quarter was working great, we always knew who was surveying, and we kept in contact to meet at the right place at the right time. After calculating, we spent 28 hours as a team surveying our transect over the 21 days.