Evaluating welfare for injured and ill birds: Katie LaBarbera

A first-year house wren at the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory banding station in San Jose, California. Photo courtesy Katie LaBarbera.

May 11, 2022

In their role as a science director at the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory (SFBBO), Katie LaBarbera spends quality time with a wide range of feathery faces at the observatory’s bird banding station in North San Jose, California. 

“Holding a wild bird is a very specific joy,” says LaBarbera, an ornithologist with a PhD in integrative biology. “They’re fragile, but they’re also really fierce.” 

For decades, SFBBO’s bird banding station has operated in a small patch of riparian forest across the street from fast food chains and office buildings in the middle of Silicon Valley. SFBBO staff carefully catch birds in fine mesh netting, jot down a detailed list of data points on them, and set them free again. Through the years, SFBBO has accumulated a gold mine of information on wild birds, and now, LaBarbera will study it with a wild animal welfare perspective.

LaBarbera’s project is one of seven studies that Wild Animal Initiative selected in spring 2022 for full funding. Armed with more than 30 years of capture and recapture data about more than 100,000 individuals, LaBarbera plans to investigate how juvenile and adult birds fare after visiting the bird banding station with an injury or illness. The results of this study, LaBarbera says, could inform how other bird banding stations or wildlife rehabilitation centers decide what to do with hurt or sick birds after intake. In addition, the study will contribute to a better understanding of the harms animals suffer in the wild. 

A close look at birds

Katie LaBarbera with a sharp-shinned hawk. Photo courtesy Katie LaBarbera.

LaBarbera grew up in Chicago, where they enjoyed watching the pigeons and house sparrows around their neighborhood.

“I would watch them flitting around in the bushes or building nests, and it looked like a lot of fun,” LaBarbera says. “It left a big impression on me as a kid.”

LaBarbera’s childhood interest developed into an academic pursuit, first at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology studying house wrens, and then at the University of California, Berkeley, where they studied Oregon juncos. Their work at SFBBO fuses their academic interest in birds with numerous opportunities to see them up close at the bird banding station. 

Researchers and volunteers at SFBBO’s bird banding station undergo training to learn how to handle birds safely. They hold the wild birds in their hands when banding them, getting a brief but detailed look at their colorful feathers, sharp beaks, and gleaming eyes. These encounters afford bird banders like LaBarbera the chance to observe avian characteristics that might be missed from afar.

“You get a sense for the sort of alien body structure they have,” LaBarbera notes. “It becomes obvious that they evolved from dinosaurs. Another interesting detail is that their skin is basically transparent. Unlike mammals, which store fat in a continuous layer under the skin, birds store fat under their skin in just a few places, so if you gently blow the feathers out of the way, you can see things like their muscles or the food they ate.”

LaBarbera says SFBBO catches the same birds over and over again. Repeated observations are incredibly valuable as a tool for wild animal welfare science.

A unique wealth of bird data

A first-year male Oregon junco at the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory banding station in San Jose, California. Photo courtesy Katie LaBarbera.

“It’s unusual to have such a long-term banding dataset,” LaBarbera says. “There are banding stations all over the world, but typically, they don’t go back decades, and they usually don't catch the same birds repeatedly.”

Because of California’s mild climate, the banding station sees many birds that live in the area year-round. Over the years, LaBarbera says they’ve heard anecdotes about birds who suffered dramatic injuries but recovered by the time of their next sighting. One example, they say, involved a sparrow who had lost the top half of their bill. Each time they saw the bird afterwards, they observed that the bill was starting to grow back, and the bird’s body condition slowly improved over two years.

Stories like this provide snapshots of birds’ lives, but in order to understand what really happens, “you need to dig into the data,” LaBarbera says.

With Wild Animal Initiative’s funding, LaBarbera plans to review the dataset and categorize the type and severity of observed injuries and illnesses. They will construct a model that relates welfare indicators to injury type, bird age, species, and time of year. After analyzing injury outcomes, LaBarbera will write a report for bird banding stations and wildlife rescues with recommendations for handling injured wild birds.

LaBarbera has volunteered in wildlife rehabilitation hospitals, and they have seen firsthand the difficult life-or-death decisions that staff have to make. Some hospitals might, for example, have established policies to euthanize one-legged birds, and LaBarbera’s study could provide evidence to determine whether these policies are truly the best choice for the bird’s welfare.

“We’ve seen one-legged songbirds do well and seem healthy in the wild, so with the results of this study, we might be able to provide better, data-backed guidelines for rehabilitation or release,” they say.

WHY WE FUNDED THIS PROJECT

With thousands of wild animal rehabilitation centers in the US alone, this study could provide information that would allow rehabilitators to make data-driven decisions about their bird patients. This project also advances one of our core goals — understanding what wild animals’ lives are like — using an existing and humanely acquired dataset.

Wild bird welfare

As Wild Animal Initiative works to support the field of wild animal welfare science, researchers like LaBarbera advance the effort by seeking answers to key questions about the lives of wild animals. LaBarbera says they hope their work will influence best practices at other bird banding stations, but also, their research can provide insight into what it’s like to be a bird. In the long term, studying injury and illness in wild birds could lead to effective interventions that improve the welfare of other wild animals.

“I’ve always been interested in the subjective experiences of animals, and this project could help us get closer to knowing what individual birds are experiencing,” LaBarbera says. 

LaBarbera’s proposed study is funded by Wild Animal Initiative’s Grants Program. If you are a researcher or student interested in pursuing wild animal welfare science, please take a look at our latest call for proposals. Wild Animal Initiative is accepting expressions of interest through June 30, 2022. 

RELATED RESEARCH

Katie LaBarbera and their colleague Josh Scullen published a paper in the Journal of Ornithology using SFFBO’s dataset. The paper, titled Using individual capture data to reveal large‐scale patterns of social association in birds, was published in 2021.

This is the first story in a series of features on our spring 2022 cohort of grantees. Please subscribe to our newsletter to get future stories delivered straight to your inbox.