Week 5 - Spring Quarter

This week was one of the biggest weeks for our project! It was an exciting, sad, and intense moment to find our first bird carcass in front of McHenry library. Sadly, this happened after the 21-day experimental survey ended, but we could still capture the data point as anecdotal evidence. We decided the species via slack messages that the bird we found dead in front of McHenry was a juvenile dark-eyed Junco. Considering all the birds, we found hatching in the last 21 days, this made a lot of sense. In addition, our 3-day survey came in a lot of help in allowing us more access to environmental knowledge about the situation.

Besides the above exciting point, we also got the opportunity to update the IACUC protocol attached to our survey that describes the location of our survey. Once we opened our survey up and approved adding the coastal campus to the bird-window collision survey protocol, Natalia found two fantastic volunteers named Claire and Patrick. Natalia specifically found two volunteers who spend more time at the coastal campus, which works very well. Understanding the IACUC process feels excellent and makes me comfortable filling out similar forms and creating a dialogue about research projects with ethics in mind.