DFO special program Monday, March 8 at 7 PM

[Sharon]

Please join us via Zoom on Monday, March 8 at 7 PM for From Redpoll Plumage to Chickadee Poop: Insights into Avian Ecology. The program is free and open to the public. Register here. 

Black-capped and Mountain chickadees are frequently seen along Colorado’s Front Range, where increasing urbanization has altered the tree species present. That change in the increasingly suburbanized forest has disrupted the food available for insectivorous birds like chickadees, potentially disrupting their breeding success as well.

 For her DFO-funded research, CU Boulder undergraduate Cori Carver monitored chickadee breeding from Boulder to Nederland, conducting arthropod surveys and analyzing fecal samples from nestlings to determine the effects of human development and activity on the habitats of songbirds.

 Meanwhile . . . Redpolls! Those nomadic finches of the North are notorious for presenting identification challenges and a long history of taxonomic debate. CU Boulder doctoral student Erik Funk examined the genetic basis of certain redpoll traits to better understand the evolutionary mechanism involved and whether it is resulting in the formation of new species or maintaining variation within the species.