![]() Dealing with stubborn collaborators is hard. Repeating your experiment for what feels like the thousandth time is hard. Science is really hard sometimes, and you have to stick with it. ![]() What is the most important characteristic a researcher must demonstrate in order to be an effective researcher? Stubbornness, hands down. It turns out feathers make a fantastic array of sounds! ![]() I've been really successful at it - I have some truly amazing displays that I've seen, and I will eventually get them up on YouTube. Sometimes finding the displays works through sheer luck. I have to do my homework for these trips, and it takes some mighty sleuthing I read ornithological books for hints (such as what time of year they might breed), and I talk to other ornithologists and birders for clues. A famous ornithologist, James Van Remsen, once offhandedly mentioned, "Only a fool would study the woodstars," because of how hard they are to find. My other favorite thing is going to look for a poorly known hummingbird in a remote place, and seeing its courtship display for the first time. I was already thinking about all of the other species I had to study - but of course, it also meant that I had to repeat the experiment a few more times, in order to convince other scientists that my result was real. I spent the rest of the day with my head in a cloud, thinking about what this meant. and whiff, he didn't make the sound! 10 times in a row he failed! I was astonished. I had told people that the sound was vocal, and I was testing just to make sure. that the bird would still make the loud CHIRP when missing two tiny feathers. So I wanted to test whether the tail makes this sound, by finding a male who could make the sound, then catching him and removing his outer tail feathers and getting him to dive again. It sounds like a vocalization, like a bird sitting there going, "chirp, chirp," except he's diving at high speed when he does it. Male Anna's hummingbirds make this loud CHIRP when they perform a courtship dive to a female. One is when I do an experiment that has clear results, and not at all what I had expected. What is your favorite thing about being a researcher? I have two favorite things. I counted the feedings for a few hours they fed their babies about every four minutes, for the wholeday. ![]() Later when they had babies, they would bring green caterpillars from the Douglas firs nearby. I figured out which one was female - she would shiver her wings and the male would feed her. They couldn't see through the window, but I could see and hear them really well (and hear the babies) when I lay in bed, so I watched them for hours. They would land on the wire about two feet from the window, before and after going to the box. A pair of black-capped chickadees nested in it for the next couple of years. When I was in cub scouts (age 11), I made a birdhouse that we hung outside the window by my bed. What was your first scientific experiment as a child? I didn't experiment - I observed. Once I finally figured out a series of tricks (patience and a willingness to sit on the ground for hours being the most important), it was so exciting to finally get some data! It's important to recognize when you've used bad judgment - and to fix it. I spent my entire first field season failing to get Anna's hummingbirds to perform displays. If you don't try an experiment because you're afraid it won't work, then you're not going to do your best science. One lesson here is that you have to let yourself make mistakes in order to learn. And most of that comes from bad judgment." What is the best piece of advice you ever received? "Good judgment comes from experience. So that's how I find myself studying the sounds birds make when they fly. It turns out that by putting the feathers in a wind tunnel, these non-vocal sounds were really easy to reproduce and study. This isn't the "humming" sound that they're famous for, but rather, these were sounds that many people thought were vocal. The current project arose when I figured out that hummingbirds were making loud sounds with their tail-feathers during courtship displays. Hummingbirds have unparalleled flight abilities and they're not afraid to show off, so studying their flight was the best fit. I thought to myself, "hummingbirds are really cool! And they'd be easy to catch, which would make them easy to study!" If you decide to study a particular animal, then you have to make sure that your research question fits the animal well. (Image credit: Chris Clark, Yale University)Īt age 22, I was sitting at a diner in Idaho, watching calliope Hummingbirds visit a feeder that was inches from my face. The tail is spread to make a loud sound at the bottom of the dive. A composite of an Anna's hummingbird diving to a female.
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