Photo by Sarah Hadley

Species of the day –February 28, 2013 – Leafcutter ants

Leafcutter ants are amazing. The amount of work the preform is really impressive. According to Wikipedia “Next to humans, leafcutter ants form the largest and most complex animal societies on Earth.” and “…containing eight million individuals.” We have found many of their giant mounds of excavated dirt and long cleared trails over which they haul leaf cuttings. The leaves they cut are used to feed fungus that they cultivate underground. These photos show a line of workers coming down a tree and also a place where they have had to drop a bunch of leaves in the hot sun.

Photo by Sarah Hadley

Photo by Sarah Hadley

Species of the day –Back-dated#4 – Orange-collared Manakin (Manacus aurantiacus)

While this is a very bright and exciting bird just because of the way it looks, it is also exciting for another reason. The males display in a group at a location called a ‘lek’. Part of their display involves flying back and forth making a sound that sounds like a string of firecrackers going off.

Photo by Sarah Hadley

Species of the day –Back-dated#3 – Golden silk orb-weaver (Nephila clavipes)

This giant spider is often as big or bigger than a large person’s hand! It is called a golden orb-weaver because its web is like strands of gold. The web is also very strong and can catch quite large things – even hummingbirds!

Species of the day –Back-dated#2 – White-tipped Sicklebill (Eutoxeres aquila)

Here is an amazing example of an adaptation (extreme bill curvature) that allows this species of hummingbird to access flowers that have curved corollas preventing hummingbirds with shorter or less-curved bills. These hummingbirds have a small indent in their forehead that seems to be a place where a lot of pollen can collect. Clearly this is a very neat example of co-evolution.

Photo by Sarah Hadley

Species of the day –Back-dated#1 – Emerald glass frog (Centrolene prosoblepon)

This amazing little frog is called is called a ‘glass frog’ because its skin is translucent and you can see many of its internal organs! It also has super sticky feet and it feels really neat when it jumps onto you. Here is a picture of it on Matt’s glasses.

Photo by Sarah Hadley

Photo by Sarah Hadley

Species of the day –February 27, 2013 – Scarlet-thighed Dacnis (Dacnis venusta)

This was a very exciting capture for us! This tanager has iridescent blue and black feathers on its upper parts and then scarlet (bright red) thighs. The bird guide describes the blue as ‘electric-blue’ and this is a very apt description!

Research update – February 24, 2013 – Season Midpoint

Photo by Sarah Hadley

Hi Folks,

I know it has been a while since the last blog posting. While this might indicate that not much of interest has taken place, it is actually quite the opposite… We end up with so much going on that we have no time to write about it! We are now at the midpoint of the season in terms of time. People have come and gone, been sick and injured. Things have been constructed, broken and then fixed. A lot has been done and there is much still to do! The first part of the season has ended up being a huge amount of preparation and exploratory data collection. The main tasks we were working at were:

1. Finishing constructing and troubleshooting the RFID readers. Without these units in operation we can collect very little data this season!! Obviously this has been a critical hurdle.

2. We had to catch and tag all of the hummingbirds whose movement patterns we hope to study. This involves three or more capture sessions at each of the eight landscapes…

Photo by Adam Hadley

We have accomplished some important research, but there is still much left to do! So far we have captured 187 birds!

Photo by Sarah Hadley

3. We had to design an antenna attachment to read the hummingbirds when they visit our feeder ‘flowers’. This was much harder than it sounds and involved a lot of time quietly watching how the hummingbirds position themselves when they come to feed and more ‘trial and error’ then we would have liked.

Photos by Evan Jackson

4. We ran a series of pollination experiments to continue our quest to find out why hummingbirds can pollinate when we can’t.

5. We laid out sampling designs in four forest patches in order to examine how hummingbirds move among our feeder stations. Each site begins with a central feeder where we captured hummingbirds and then has lines of feeders heading out in four different directions from this point. This design allows us to test how far hummingbirds are moving at sites with different amounts of forest, different forest patch sizes, and through different types of cover (For example: old forest, young forest, pasture, hedgerows).

What have we learned?

So far we only have the readers up at two of our grids. It looks as though the birds are visiting the feeders in both old and young forest and avoiding those in pasture. We will have to see if this pattern holds up as more data comes in. We have detected some individuals moving up to 550 m across our grid.

For the results of the pollination experiment we will have to wait a few of weeks until Adam is back in Oregon and can analyze the flowers we collected. This takes quite a bit of lab work and we have run out of time to do it here in the field.