A Summer of Research: Jesse's Project

You wake up between 5 and 5:30 in the morning, get dressed in some clothes that you don’t particularly care about, have a quick breakfast, and are on the road by 6 to start the day.  After a drive to the edge of the city you arrive at a patch of pine trees either in a forest, a park, or even on the side of the highway.  You want to get there as close to sunrise as you can, so that you will be able to hear the most bird songs and therefore be able to identify each species of bird.  After 10 minutes you move on to another patch of pine trees and repeat.  By 10:00 you have visited six or more of your research sites.

At this point it’s time to start your vegetation surveys.  You record key measures of the vegetation at each sampling site, to better distinguish each spot’s capacity to benefit biodiversity.  This will require a lot of walking and crawling through thick underbrush, brambles, and marshland, but just ignore the oppressive heat and humidity and deal with the ticks, chiggers and mosquitoes later on.  After you've filled out five pages of notes on the surrounding trees, shrubs, and ground cover, you can move on to another site and continue your vegetation surveys.

Why would someone willingly subject themselves to this, you ask? Well, for science, of course!  And there are certainly some perks to the job that offset the blood sucking parasites.  If you’re lucky, you might get to catch a glimpse of Red-tailed Hawks as they plummet out of the trees to catch a small scurrying mammal for lunch.  And occasionally your research takes you into the mountains, where you can stand on top of Bald Rock and look out for miles over the misty foothills of the Appalachians, or to nearby Paris Mountain, where you could take a lunch break and have a quiet picnic by the lake.  

        The schedule which I described above was part of the research done this past summer by senior Jesse Wood, in collaboration with professor Dr. John Quinn. The goal of Jesse’s study was to evaluate the effects of local and landscape features on the distribution of Brown-headed Nuthatches in pine tree patches throughout the Upstate.  The Brown-headed nuthatch is a small brown and white songbird found throughout the Southeastern US, and Jesse needed to be able to identify that species and other common birds of the upstate by both sight and sound.  She practiced recognizing Nuthatch calls and other birdsong for several weeks before going out into the field to put her skills to the test.  Now, when she takes a walk, she can distinguishing between mockingbirds, cardinals, wrens, and others simply by their vocalizations.

The vegetation data came into play as Jesse determined how the pine patches differ from one another.  For example, if one stand of pine trees is in between two heavily trafficked roads while another is in the middle of an isolated deciduous forest, then there is likely to be some difference in the distribution of birds at those two sites.  Similarly, a pine stand that is in a relatively open area, such as the Furman golf course, might show a different distribution from a pine stand tucked among a heavily wooded swamp.

Of course, you may be wondering “what importance does this research have to people who aren’t interested in birds?” and that's fair. One answer I can offer hinges upon the fact that the Brown-headed Nuthatch is what is known as an umbrella species.  This means that the presence of Nuthatches in a particular habitat indicates that the habitat is suitable for many other species of birds.  Therefore, where we find Brown-headed Nuthatches, we can infer that species such as the Eastern Wood-Pewee and the near-threatened Red Headed Woodpecker are capable of thriving in the same type of habitat. In this case, that means the pine forests of the southeast, habitat that is declining in the state of South Carolina.  And not only is this information relevant for bird enthusiasts, but it can be relevant for business or development.  For example, an ecologically minded person might make a different development decision regarding the destruction of an older pine stand if he knew the environmental implications and the number of species that would be affected.  This type of thought process, where decisions are made based on an understanding of all the possible implications of those decisions, is one of the goals of conservation biology, and one of the reasons research like this is so important.