Restoring California’s Great Estuary

A view of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta

The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) has produced a video called Restoring California’s Great Estuary that explains the EcoRestore initiative which is one of the big, state-wide efforts that is aiming at restoring some fairly significant amounts of habitat to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Being that I work for a State agency called the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Conservancy, this is something that I pay a lot of attention to. But there are a lot of reasons that everyone who lives in California, and many people who live outside the state, should also be interested in this video. A large portion of the people, farms, ranches, and industries in California rely, at least in part, on water from the Delta. That fact alone should make efforts like

Also, I work with many of the people featured in this video including my boss, Campbell Ingram. Seeing talented people that I know talking about an issue that I care about makes this video that much more appealing to me, but that probably won’t have much impact on you.

Enjoy!

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Chemical and Biological Control of Arundo on Brannan Island State Recreation Area

This is a link to a blog post I wrote for the UC Davis-USDA Delta Region Areawide Aquatic Weed Project website. The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Conservancy (the agency I work for) gets funding from the USDA to control Arundo infestations in the Delta.

Arundo (which I have written about previously here) is a highly invasive plant that causes bank destabilization, increased fire hazard, increased water use, and excludes native plants and animals. The Delta Conservancy has been coordinating with a the Sonoma Ecology Center and the USDA to apply treatments of herbicides and/or insects that are specific Arundo parasites to eliminate Arundo from as much of the Delta as possible. This work began last summer/fall at the Brannan Island State Recreation Area, as site that is owned by California State Parks and which has a lot of Arundo.

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DWR: My First Two Months

I have been working for the California Department of Water Resources for a couple of months now. It has been a really cool experience in many ways, and I thought that sharing some of those experiences would be fun. So, here are a bunch of photos from my first two months on the job. The job, in this case, is focused on a place called the Clifton Court Forebay in eastern Contra Costa County. This is one of the main points where water is collected and then pumped from the Forebay into the California Aqueduct for transport to southern California. One of the major problems with this pumping system is that it is so powerful it pulls lots of fish into the Forebay including several species of threatened or endangered species such as Chinook Salmon, Steelhead, and Green Sturgeon. In response to this puling in of high numbers of fish, high numbers of predators also concentrate around the Forebay. These predators include predatory fish such as Stripped Bass, Large-mouth Bass, and several species of catfish. Other predators are many species of piscivorous birds such as herons, egrets, pelicans, grebes, terns, etc. The main point of the project I am working on is to find ways of reducing the numbers of predators in and around the Forebay. To do this, we are trying to figure out how and where the predators most commonly access the Forebay. This includes frequent avian surveys around the Forebay and also tracking the movement of the predatory fish. This tracking is accomplished by capturing fish and preforming surgeries on them to implant PIT tags and/or acoustic tags in them. These tags emit sound at particular frequencies and in particular patterns. Each tag has a unique combination of frequency and pattern which allows each tag to be individually identifiable. Microphones are setup around the Forebay and in the canals that connect to the Forebay so that as fish swim around, their tags are picked up and their locations recorded. In this way, we can track fish movement to a pretty fine level of detail. Pretty cool!

So, with that background, here is what my job actually looks like (all photos are my own unless otherwise noted).

The front doors of my building.

This is the Resources Building in downtown Sac.

My little corner.

Sunrise over the yard where we keep our trucks and boats.

This is me with my first Stripped Bass. It is just a small one, but still big enough to tag! (Photo courtesy of Mike Cane).

A view of the edge of the Forebay.

Osprey.

Bald Eagle.

The portion of the Forebay that leads into the pumps.

Tule beds in a corner of the Forebay.

A view across the Forebay.

One of the canals that leads into the Forebay.

The east slope of Mount Diablo in the distance.

Can you see the bird?

There it is! This is a Snowy Plover that I found on the edge of the Forebay. I was pretty excited to find this federally threatened species, especially since this was decidedly outside its normal habitat and range.

Here is another photo of the same HY Snowy Plover.

A flock of Long-billed Curlews and WIllets hanging out on the edge of the Forebay.

Long-billed Curlew.

Long-billed Curlew in flight.

I found this Red-shouldered Hawk on the bank of the Sacramento River as I walked to work one morning. It is sitting on a California Groundsquirrel.

Piscivorous birds lined up on one of the wing walls in the Forebay.

There are obviously a lot of fish to be had.

Pied-billed Grebe nesting in the floating vegetation that grows in the Forebay.

Clark’s and Western Grebes nesting on the Forebay.

This large fly (about 2-3 cm long) landed on the truck. Any ideas as to an ID?

Another view of Mount Diablo.

Me conducting an avian survey (Photo courtesy of Michelle Tyson).

Caspian Tern, Snowy Egret, and California Gulls.

American White Pelicans feeding in the Forebay.

One American White Pelican swam quite close to us as we were counting.

Clark’s and Western Grebes nesting in a patch of floating vegetation.

A closer look at the Clark’s and Western Grebe nesting colony.

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Seeing

Being able to see what is in front of you is an important skill. This may seem like one of those statements that is so obvious that there is no point making it. However, it seems to be a skill that is difficult to master. Recently, I have been running into this issue a lot. As I have mentioned in other posts, I am a Teaching Assistant for an introductory biology class at U.C. Davis on Phylogenetics and Biodiversity. A large part of this class is exploring how organisms (plants, animals, fungi, microbes, etc.) are similar to, or different from, one another. This requires students to actually look at organisms and determine these similarities and differences, and here lies the rub. Getting college students to simply describe what they see is frequently a real challenge. We will be looking at an organism and when I ask them to tell me what they see, they immediately begin telling me what kind of organism it is. That is not the same thing. I am asking them to describe what is in front of them (a soft body, two openings for water, no skeletal support system) and instead they are giving me labels (a Tunicate).

And this phenomenon is not limited to college students. I have been a birder all my life and sometimes lead birding walks for various organizations. I have often asked other birders I am with to tell me what they see when looking at a particular bird. Their tendency, young birder and old, is to start attempting to put a name on the bird. Instead of looking at the bird and letting what they actually see guide them to an identification, they jump ahead and start putting names on the bird that often basically amount to guesses. Over and over again, in so many different settings, I have seen this kind of thing happen, and it is always because the people looking at the world are not able to slow down and really see it!

This need to rush to a label is really troubling for me. I know humans have a sort of innate tendency to want to put things in boxes, but surely we should be able to overcome that tendency. We should be able to look at an object and just take it in. Make note of what you see before you and let that information guide your thinking. The desire to put a label on something reverses this process. By putting a label on an object, we are biasing what we think that object will be like.

I have seen this happen in the birding world so many times! Someone will see a bird. Great! They will not know what it is right off the bat. Nothing wrong with that! So they will ask for help in identifying it. Wonderful! Then the problems start. Instead of looking at the bird are really seeing what is there to see they jump to the identification, the label. Since they did not know what the bird was, the label they jump to is often just a guess and is usually wrong. And here is where it gets weird. Once they made that jump to the incorrect identification the birders will start saying that they see field marks that are not there, but that are consistent with their jumped to label. Let me say that again. They start seeing things that are not there! How we think about the world alters how we perceive the world. By giving in too quickly to the urge to put labels a thing, we can influence how view the thing. This gets downright dangerous in the world of science.

I would like to encourage everyone (scientists and non-scientists alike) to do, would be to look at an object and really see what it has to show you. The identification of an object is the end goal, not where we should be starting. Instead, the first step must be to make careful observations. Just look at the thing and see what is actually there without making any jumps or judgment calls. Then the information from those observations needs to be carefully thought about. Then, after you have absorbed and considered what is in front of you, let that information guide you to an identification, if possible.

But really see the world! Don’t see what you want to see, or what you think you are going to see, or what you think someone else is expecting you to see. Just let yourself take a moment to look carefully, and really see.

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Field Season’s End

Yesterday, I was up in the mountains for my last field day of the year. I spent a few hours in Truckee, CA and after not getting a lot of Evening Grosbeak action, I headed to Soda Springs, CA. Not much going on their either, so it was not a particularly strong finish, but it is always nice to be in the wilds. Just how nice it is to spend regular time in wilderness got me thinking about next year. I am not planning on having field work next year, as I will be working on other projects, and I am really gong to miss my regular mountain visits. I have been spending one day a week, almost every week, in the Sierra for the last two summers and falls. I have seen some beautiful locations and had the opportunity to get to know several areas at a very detailed level. It has been wonderful to feel like I am genuinely getting better at knowing the birds up there by sight and sound. To get more comfortable with a biological community like this has been a really special treat, for me.

I am not sure what I am going to do to fill that gap next year. My research projects are probably going to keep me pretty close to home most of the time. I have already started exploring my local area in more detail, which has been fun and which I will certainly continue to do. But birding in the Sacramento area is just not wild like the Sierra. There is nothing close to me that is. Well, we will see what happens.

I can say that these past two summers have been fairly successful. I have collected enough data for what should become one chapter of my dissertation! I am now going to get to work analyzing the data, writing the paper, and getting it published. That is going to be fun. But it will certainly be good to have this section of my work finished. Feeling like I am accomplishing steps towards my degree is something I have been lacking recently, and getting this out the door will be a big step in the right direction. I will certainly post updates as that process occurs!

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Biiiirrrrding in the Rain!

I was out along the shores of Bucks Lake near Quincy, CA, last week, in the hope of getting some more of my field work done. Unfortunately, I did not think to check the weather report before I left. It has been so dry this summer that it did not even cross my mind that it might rain! Well, this was the day that rain it did. A lot! It started as I was driving up into the mountains, and did not stop all morning! When I got to Bucks Lake I parked near Haskins Creek and sat in my car for a while. I soon decided, however, that if I was going to up there, I might as well get out and do some birding. Maybe I would find some Evening Grosbeaks and see what they were up to in the rain.

Well, I did not find any Evening Grosbeaks, but I did get a good bit of birding in. I spent most of my time watching a big flock of White-crowned Sparrows, Golden-crowned Sparrows and Dark-eyed Juncos. Watching the birds forage in the rain was pretty cool. The lighter showers were not enough to bother most of the birds most of the time, and so they stayed along the roadside. It was only when a heavier downpour began that the birds would retreat into the cover of some dense willow thickets and wait until the rain lightened up again. I was struck, as I often am, by how dramatic an event migration is. Just last week, I was up in the mountains and saw my very first White-crowned, and Golden-crowned, Sparrows of the fall. Now, here is a flock of about 60 White-crowns and 20 Golden-crowns! Just like that, this synchronized wave of millions of birds has descended upon California!

As I continued to watch this flock, I started to pick out the odd birds that were mixed in. There was one Song Sparrow. A few Yellow-rumped Warblers flew in and out. Of these, two were of the Myrtle subspecies, which is generally the more eastern subspecies, so they were cool to find. I continued to watch through my binoculars, but suddenly the birds that I could see scattered. I took my binoculars down and saw that the whole flock was racing for cover! I looked up and found out the reason for the sudden panic. An adult Red-shouldered Hawk was flying right up the middle of the meadow and directly over the foraging passerines. The hawk did not actually make any directed move towards the small birds, but instead flew off into the trees. A little later, an adult Bald Eagle also flew, rather dramatically through the rain and mists, over the flock. This bird did not cause any reaction from the sparrows at all, and neither did a Common Raven a few minutes after the eagle. The sparrows can apparently tell the difference between various predators, and know which they should worry about. I thought this demonstrated some pretty fine ID skills on the part of the sparrows!

In spite of being cold and wet and not finding any Evening Grosbeaks and not getting any field work done, I really enjoyed that morning in the storm. It made me realize how much I have missed being out in the rain!

Here is my full species list:

Bald Eagle (1)

Red-shouldered Hawk (1)

Northern Flicker (2)

Steller’s Jay (11)

Common Raven (1)

Mountain Chickadee (3)

Red-breasted Nuthatch (3)

Golden-crowned Kinglet (5)

American Robin (8)

Yellow-rumped Warbler (3 Audubon’s, 2 Myrtle)

Song Sparrow (1)

White-crowned Sparrow (60)

Golden-crowned Sparrow (20)

Dark-eyed Junco (20)

Brewer’s Blackbird (1)

 

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A Novel Context for Evening Grosbeak Flight Calls

A few days ago, I found myself in Blackwood Canyon on the west coast of Lake Tahoe. It is a beautiful spot where Evening Grosbeaks have been reported regularly over the last couple of weeks. The day was lovely, and the birding was terrific with lots of classic mountain birds all around. Warbling Vireos and Hermit Warblers were foraging in the poplars that grow along side the stream that runs down the middle of the canyon. MacGillivray’s and Wilson’s Warblers were leading young birds around through the willows. Spotted Sandpipers were walking and bobbing their tails as they foraged along the rocky stream edges. Female Mallards lead broods of ducklings from pool to pool.

I did find a flock of Evening Grosbeaks, though they were not particularly cooperative in terms of my research plans. However, while I did not get the experimental trials I had hoped for accomplished, I did see something new and cool. I was stopped along the side of a road at around 9:30am beside a small group of spruce tree when I heard an Evening Grosbeak giving really loud flight calls. They were actually kind of spectacularly loud! As I watched, I saw the grosbeak, a male, flying from tree top to tree top and continuing to give these high amplitude calls. After standing below him recording for a few minutes, I figured out why he was behaving this way. There was an adult Red-tailed Hawk perched in the top of one of the spruce trees and the grosbeak was mobbing it. Now, Evening Grosbeaks are known to use their flight calls to coordinate the movement of a flock and they are also used by birds to locate other individuals over long distances. Further, they may possibly play a role in mate choice decisions and in population identification. However, to the best of my knowledge, this is the first time flight call have been observed being used in a predator harassment context! After a few more minutes, the Red-tailed Hawk flew off. The Evening Grosbeak, having succeeded in annoying the predator into leaving, quieted down and then departed on his own business.

This was yet another reminder that calls can have many different functions even when it is basically the same call, and even when that call is has a fairly simple structure. What subtle differences communicate different information to a receiver? Was the volume of these calls an important component of harassing a predator? Are there other differences (speed of delivery, frequency range, something else) between flight calls that are used in different contexts? I have this one recording, and so will certainly examine it to see if there is anything that jumps out at me, but with only the one occurrence, it will be hard to identify smaller differences, even though such small differences may be quite important to the birds involved. This also served as a reminder that exciting things can happen, but you have to spend time out with your study subjects to see them!

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A New Field Season Begins

This week I began my summer field season. I am planning weekly excursions up into, and throughout, the Sierra Nevada mountains to find Evening Grosbeaks, my study species. My first day in the field was a modest start. I left West Sacramento at 3:00am and drove up highway CA-49 to the San Francisco State Field Campus just outside of the tiny town of Bassetts, CA. When I arrived, at around 6:00, it was lightly misty and on the cold side. I walked around the field camp a little and heard the forest wake up. It was not long before I heard my first Evening Grosbeak of the day and setup my equipment. As the weather cleared, I got some work done testing how Evening Grosbeaks respond to recordings of various kinds, but there were not that many grosbeaks around. There were a bunch of other birds around that gave me some great looks, including several near collisions. At various points in the morning, I was nearly hit in the head by a Western Tanager, a Red-breasted Sapsucker, a White-headed Woodpecker, and a Mountain Chickadee! I also got to see an Osprey circling high overhead with its breakfast, a moderate sized fish, in its talons. But, since the grosbeaks were not especially cooperative I decided to try a new spot. I continued east on CA-49 to Yuba Pass where I was happy to find more grosbeaks along with a few Red Crossbills, lots of Cassin’s Finches, and several Chipping Sparrows, one of which landed on the side of the road not five feet from me and sang and sang. Delightful! After a while, and grosbeaks only showing up few and far between, I headed back down towards Bassetts where I saw Townsend’s Solitaire, which were a real treat for me, and a very lovely pair of Fox Sparrows. Then, after a brief stop in at the Sierra Skies RV Park in Sierra City, I was homeward bound. Odd as it sounds, the RV park in Sierra City was a great field site for me during my Master’s work. All in all, it was great to get out into the field and shake the dust off my methodology. I only got 5 actual trials, and since I am aiming for 10 each day, that was a bit lower than I would like. But there is a lot of summer ahead, so the work will get done. Next week I am planning on heading to the area around Quincy, CA and Bucks Lake to poke around, and hopefully fine more Evening Grosbeaks who will listen to my recordings and let me know what they think of them!

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Changing Climate, Changing Behaviors

That the earth’s climate is changing has become a well established fact, but determining exactly how these changes will effect ecosystems is still an area of active research.  Within this scope of research, how climate change will effect animal behavior is a particularly understudied topic.  But, a recent presentation at the 2013 Animal Behavior Society conference gave an interesting example of just that.  The information presented was on where the Pantless Tree Frog (Dendropsophus ebraccatus) decides to lay its eggs.  This species, which is found throughout Central America, sometimes lays its eggs on the underside of leaves and at other times lays them in the water.  Each location has advantages and disadvantages.  Laying eggs in water mean that they are pretty much guaranteed to sty moist, but there are predators in the water that eat frogs eggs, so more clutches fail due to predation.  Laying eggs on leaves exposes the eggs to much lower rates of predation, but if the eggs dry out they die.  Generally, conditions in the range of the Pantless Tree Frog are quite rainy and so the frogs choose the option of avoiding predation and they lay their eggs on leaves.

However, as the climate has changed rain storms have become more and more sporadic over the last 4 decades, and are likely to become even more so in the future.  This has meant that Pantless Tree Frogs are having to lay their eggs in water to prevent them from drying out.  However, this leaves them open to the greater predation rates.  When predation rates go up on a species, the population level of that species usually finds a new equilibrium level that is lower than before the predation rates rose.  And smaller populations are classically more vulnerable to be reduced further by natural disasters like floods or droughts, and experience higher likelihoods of extinction.

In this way, the Pantless Tree Frog is an excellent example of how changes in an animals’ behavior, in this case in response to climate change, can have important conservation implications.

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The Lek Paradox

A lek is an area where many males of a species come together and display.  These displays can include very elaborate vocalizations, plumage, and behaviors such as the complex dances of some birds of paradise.  The displays play a very important role in mate selection in these species because they are the only trait that the females who visit the lek have to judge which male to mate with.  Males of lekking species do not hold territories where the female can raise her young and find food or provide parental aid in any other form.  The females provide all the care for their young, so what are the females choosing in a mate?  They are choosing genes.  Males that have traits that make them attractive have the genes that code for those traits, and so the offspring of these males should also have those traits and be attractive.  So, by choosing attractive mates, the females are maximizing the odds that their own genes will also be passed on to the next generation.  This setting results in some theoretical complications in terms of sexual selection.  One important one is that if females pick traits over and over again for generation after generation all the males will end up having the same traits.  If all the males are the same, there will be no way for the females to tell which males are the fittest and therefore who to pick to mate with and the whole system will collapse.  Yet this does not happen.  So how is variation being maintained in the face of strong selection?  This is the lek paradox.

Several solutions to the lek paradox have been proposed.  One is that females may not choose the same trait every breeding season.  This is often referred to as the fluctuating selection hypothesis (Jia et al. 2000), and it states that during one breeding season large males are favored, but then next breeding season it is males with the longest tails that are preferred, and the breeding season after that it is the loudest males that do the best.  This basically describes fads in fashion.  Also, preferences may not change breeding season to breeding season, but instead the large males may be favored for several seasons and then the shift to a different trait may be more gradual.  Either way, these changing preferences would result in the maintenance of genetic diversity.

Another possible resolution is that females may disagree with one another as to the most important traits.  This has been shown in Guppies by Brooks and Endler (2001) where females were allowed to chose between different males.  Most females seemed to agree that large males were the most fit, but when females were presented with males of equal size, some preferred males with large amounts of orange on their tails, while others preferred males that more black spots on their sides.  This disagreement would also maintain genetic variability.

A third proposed solution is that females are making an overall assessment of male fitness taking into account many traits.  This idea is called the genetic capture hypothesis (Rowe and Houle 1996), and it states that overall fitness is dependent on many morphological and physiological features.  In other words, for a male to be fit he must be able to find lots of food and escape predators and resist parasites etc.  All these abilities are coded for by many many genes, and it is the sum total of these genes that the females are choosing.

These hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, so in all likelihood there is a combination of factors at work.  But determining which is the dominant force is still an interesting goal, and still very much in dispute.

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