December 12, 2024

I’m pleased to report back to you with an update on the house sparrow research project we launched last year. Through this project, we hope to gain insight on how varying environmental conditions such as, noise level and temperature affect the welfare of a common animal, the house sparrow (Passer domesticus), and publish a series of papers with our findings.

Planning phase: Complete

In the first half of the year, I finished planning our field work and got approval for the study design from Virginia Tech’s IACUC and Wild Animal Initiative’s ethics committee. I also obtained all the equipment we would need, and practiced using the camera equipment.

Then this summer, I recruited volunteers around the Houston area to let us borrow their backyards. I set up bird feeders in the volunteers’ yards, hoping to attract house sparrow populations. Of the eight yards that were volunteered, two already had a house sparrow flock visiting the yard, and in three more we successfully attracted house sparrows to them.

We eventually need to trap numerous house sparrows in these backyards so we can band them, making it possible for us to identify individual birds by sight, and take blood samples to assess various physiological, anatomical, and behavioral variables. But house sparrows tend to be wary of unfamiliar objects and environments, so rather than jump straight into trying to trap them, first I wanted to get them used to the presence of the traps. (This is called “habituation.”)

To habituate the birds to the traps, I set the traps out in the yards with food and water inside of them, but left the doors open so the birds could still easily exit. As the weeks passed, I saw some evidence that some of the birds had habituated to the traps, but not enough to be highly confident. Still, the other members of the project team flew into Houston for a week when we’d work together to trap, band, and assess individual birds, as well as having in-depth meetings about the project.

Fieldwork: A work in progress

That week, we learned that house sparrows are very wily! They outsmarted the first kind of trap we tried (repeating sparrow traps), so then the five of us scrounged up some materials in my garage to build DIY traps with a different design — but the house sparrows didn’t fall for those either! After that, we contacted our ethics reviewers and got approval to try mist nets, which are very commonly used in ornithological studies requiring capture. Ignacio Moore, a WAI board member in Virginia, has some mist nets and graciously shipped them to us in Houston overnight. But not even the mist nets could catch the house sparrows. They would fly toward the net, then suddenly go up and over it instead of into it.

Collaborating with the team

Fortunately, the week our team spent together in person was still highly productive.

For example, in a novel and complex study like this, it’s important for the researchers to be on the same page about exactly which hypotheses they are testing, which statistics to employ, and how to run the statistical models. But different people often have different preferences about those kinds of things, and because it’s so complex, trying to reach an agreement remotely can be extremely difficult. It is not the kind of thing that lends itself to email or phone calls. So instead, we were able to all get in the same room and figure out these components of the project together in real time.

It was also great to have a face-to-face discussion about who among us would be listed as the authors of which papers we publish in relation to this project. I find that talking through that in the beginning is really important for projects like this one.

Plus, we practiced handling “birds” (using my daughter’s stuffed animal toys as stand-ins for the house sparrows) to plan out the workflow and assign each person’s exact tasks after a bird is captured. The more efficient we are, the less time each bird will be handled, and the less stressed they will be. Although we didn’t catch any birds this time, the practice session was still highly valuable for us to work on those skills for the future.

100 percent success would have been trapping all the birds and having all those conversations. We don’t have control over the birds, so the thing we couldn’t control didn’t happen. But the things we could control happened, and went really well.

What’s next

I’m going to improve the traps we built by weatherproofing them, and then take a few more months to habituate the birds to them. When I’m highly confident the birds in each population are comfortable going in and out of the traps, then we can try again to capture and study them. I also have some backup plans just in case the birds prove too difficult to trap in large numbers.

In addition to all of this, we have recruited our first research interns, who are two undergraduate students working in the lab managed by Ben Vernasco, our collaborator at Whitman College. The interns will conduct lab assays for us and analyze house sparrow behavior using video footage. The internship starts in January, so I’m excited for them to get started very soon.