I thought I’d start this blog by introducing myself and the rest of the hummingbird team a bit. Over the next few weeks, the whole hummingbird team will be sharing their experiences in Costa Rica (you won’t have to hear from just me). I’m Matt Betts, a Professor of Landscape Ecology at Oregon State University. What is landscape ecology? Well, ecology is the study of life and its interaction with the non-living environment. Landscape ecology does this, but considers both small scales (e.g., a single bird-flower interaction) and large scales (e.g., many patches of forest, each surrounded by agriculture). Landscape ecologists often try to ask whether large-scale patterns (e.g., the size of forest patches) influence important processes such as how well animals survive, have young, pollinate and spread seeds around. If you like plants, animals and think about their conservation, being a landscape ecologist is a great job.
Other members of my team include Adam Hadley, who is a postdoc at OSU and has studied hummingbirds for his PhD for 4 years. Adam is an excellent scientist and fantastic athlete – a great combination in this line of work (he had to run after hummingbirds through the jungle for some of his PhD work so that he could track their movement). Sarah Hadley, Adam’s wife, is my PhD student and has been working down here for 3 years as our main hummingbird bander. She is extremely good at handling birds (she’s done it for over 10 years) and is the only one of us (so far) to speak Spanish well. Needless to say, the project would collapse without her logistical brain. Evan Jackson is a first year graduate student also working on the project. He is the one who is testing the use of RFIDs (see Jan. 25th blog) to track hummingbird movements. In addition to working out the complicated electronics of the readers, Evan is also a master at moving through jungle quickly. This year, Bridget Guildner, a freshly minted undergradate student from OSU has also joined us. She has been helping us in the lab with the design of some other special computer-based tools to do hummingbird research (more on this later). She is by far the most tech-smart person in the group.
Every few days in this blog, we’ll be keeping you up-to-date on our work and on some of the beautiful and often strange things we see in the jungle of Costa Rica (we call this ‘the species of the day’).
Today’s species of the day is a Preying Mantis! This insect species is about the size of my hand and has amazing camouflage – its abdomen looks like a leaf (complete with bite out of it). We found this around lunch today. It jumped onto Sarah’s camera and then her face while we were taking photos. The amazing thing about the tropics is how rarely you see the same species twice. I’ve never seen this one before – it might be years before I do again.
