Category: birds

Categories
birds environment geekery

Four-and-twenty blackbirds

In the news recently has been the discovery of thousands of dead Red-winged blackbirds (with a few other species) in Arkansas and Louisiana.

Red-winged blackbird. Photo by Cephas, wikipedia.org.

Red-winged blackbirds congregate in massive communal roosts during the non-breeding season, in flocks that can number literally up to hundreds of thousands (other species do this too: robins, crows, ravens, vultures…) During the breeding season, the males stake out territories, generally in marshes, and “protect” the nests of a number of females within their territory. Notice I don’t say the females are their “mates”- in fact, what are known as “extra-pair copulations” are common in this species, and neither males nor females are monogamous.

Blackbird flock. Photo by Edibobb, wikipedia.org.

Back to the news- the most likely explanation is that the Arkansas birds died when a sleeping flock was startled by fireworks going off overhead, freaked out, and started flying into one another and other objects at high speed (however, tests are still being done for possible toxins- these birds will eat crops, and occasionally people will put out poison for them). The Louisiana birds apparently collided with power lines.

…Of course, some are into this sort of thing:

epic fail photos - Speculations FAIL

Bird collisions happen all the time– this event is definitely not unique (and, as the linked post points out, this event is tiny on the scale of bird mass deaths from human-influenced causes.)

The title of my post comes from a common English nursery rhyme, “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” I won’t get into the possible underlying meanings of the rhyme, but here it is:

Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds,
Baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened,
The birds began to sing;
Wasn’t that a dainty dish,
To set before the king?

The king was in his counting house,
Counting out his money;
The queen was in the parlour,
Eating bread and honey.

The maid was in the garden,
Hanging out the clothes;
When down came a blackbird
And pecked off her nose.

The blackbirds “baked” into the pie would be Eurasian blackbirds, not Red-winged blackbirds.

Eurasian blackbird. Photo by Snowmanradio, wikipedia.org.

In the 16th Century, it was apparently a big deal to create pies that, when cut open, contained birds that would fly out and away. Hopefully they would then angrily poop on the diners’ heads before flying to freedom, but I sadly can find no evidence for that outcome…

Categories
birds information representation visuals

Visualization project post, part 2

Because this was a very preliminary study, I only had 9 participants, mainly fellow students in the T&T program (and a last-minute addition of some family members). My main goal was to see if this would actually work, and I wasn’t really expecting dramatic results. Which is what happened- generally, there weren’t significant differences in the maps that the interactive and non-interactive viewers drew. This probably happened because the description of how to read a phylogenetic tree was too thorough (which, unfortunately, I realized after the fact…). If I do something like this again, I’ll definitely make this orientation info less detailed.

Overall, there were big differences in how well people remembered the two big groups on the tree- land birds and shorebirds- shorebird families were apparently much more challenging to remember. This result was correlated with how well people reported that they know birds in general: more general bird knowledge was related to doing better at remembering the shorebird part of the tree. One thing I might do differently would be to give people a list of family names- that way, at least terminology wouldn’t be an issue.

Some open-ended questions that I asked gave me more useful ideas for designing a future study. For example, several people said that they learned that specific families were related, but wanted to see more information on either the names of the branch groupings, or the common ancestor of related species. This raises a few interesting points, because higher-order taxonomy is often different than genetic differences (so there aren’t necessarily names for branches), and ancestral species are really hypothetical last common ancestors, not known species. It would be interesting to think of ways to communicate this to people in a diagram like this.

So, the upshot is that this project gave me some new ideas about how to design a study like this, even though it didn’t give me very conclusive results. Obviously, just adding interactivity to a phylogenetic tree won’t magically make people learn it better- it would be surprising if it did.

I probably won’t be working in interactive phylogenetic trees for my dissertation- there are a number of people working on that at the moment, but I’m think of working on something related. I’m sure I’ll be talking more about that here as my ideas come into shape.

For those interested: here’s the list of references I used in this project:

  • Baum, David A., Stacey D. Smith, and Samuel S. S. Donovan. “The Tree-Thinking Challenge.” Science 301 (2005): 979-980. Web.
  • Baum, David A., and Susan Offner. “Phylogenies and Tree-Thinking.” The American Biology Teacher 70.4 (2008): 222-229. Web.
  • Carrizo, Savrina F. “Phylogenetic Trees: An Information Visualisation Perspective.” Yi-Ping Phoebe Chen, ed. Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology 29 (2004): 315-320. Web.
  • Cranfill, Ray, and Dick Moe. Deep Green-Hyperbolic Trees. Web. 20 September 2010.
  • Liu, Zhicheng, Nancy J. Nersessian, and John T. Stasko. “Distributed Cognition as a Theoretical Framework for Information Visualization.” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. 14.6 (2008): 1173-1180. Web.
  • Maddison, David A, Katja-Sabine Schulz, and Wayne P. Maddison. “The Tree of Life Web Project.” Linnaeus Tercentenary: Progress in Invertebrate Taxonomy. Ed. Z.-Q. Zhang and W. A. Shear. Zootaxa 1668 (2007): 1-766. Web.
  • Rogers, Yvonne, and Mike Scaife. “How Can Interactive Multimedia Facilitate Learning?” In J. Lee, ed. Intelligence and Multimodality in Multimedia Interfaces: Research and Applications. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, 1998. Web.
  • Scaife, Mike, and Yvonne Rogers. “External cognition: how do graphical representations work?” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 45 (1996): 185-213. Print.
  • Stenning, Keith, and Jon Oberlander. “A Cognitive Theory of Graphical and Linguistic Reasoning: Logic and Implementation.” Cognitive Science 19.1 (1995): 97-140. Web.
  • Tree of Life Web Project. Web. 19 September 2010.
  • Tversky, Barbara. “Cognitive Maps, Cognitive Collages, and Spatial Mental Models.” A. U. Frank and I. Campari, eds. Spatial Information Theory: A Theoretical Basis for GIS, Proceedings COSIT ’93. Berlin: Springer, 1993. Print.
  • Yi, Ji Soo, Youn ah Kang, John T. Stasko, and Julie A. Jacko. “Toward a Deeper Understanding of the Role of Interaction in Information Visualization.” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 13.6 (2007): 1224-1231. Print.
  • Zhang, Jiajie, and Donald. A. Norman. “Representations in Distributed Cognitive Tasks.” Cognitive Science 18.1 (1994): 87-122.
Categories
birds evolution information representation visuals

Visualization project post, part 1

This semester, I worked on a small science visualization research project, partly for a course, and partly as a pilot study related to my possible ultimate dissertation research. I’ll probably break up my discussion of this project into a few posts.

I was interested in looking at whether interactivity affects people’s understanding of phylogenetic trees. Phylogenetic trees are one of the key tools used in the field of evolutionary biology to represent hypothesized evolutionary relationships among species or other biological groups. They let us both explore relationships among living species and make inferences about the history of life.

However, interpreting tree diagrams often presents a challenge to students. On trees, the nodes (branch points) symbolize the last common ancestor between the species represented by the branch tips. Inexperienced readers tend to “read” relationships along branch tips, rather than by nodes, which can lead to misconceptions like inferring that species on the tips gave rise to other species (e.g., frogs to snakes to birds). The correct way to read phylogenies is to think of the nodes as focal points that connect related species.

One of the diagrams from the project introduction.

My experiment was designed to test whether making a phylogenetic tree diagram interactive, in such a way as to emphasize the importance of branch-point connections, would help people recall relationships more accurately when drawing the tree from memory. Cognitive theory suggests that interactive science visualizations could be useful for building understanding, because as we manipulate a visualization, we are able to generate slightly different viewpoints of it. We then put these points of view together into a mental model. A number of groups (e.g., here, here) have experimented with interactive trees, but in most of these projects, viewers interact with the tree by selecting branch tips in a higher-level tree, which takes them to a screen with a lower-level tree. With this type of navigation, the viewer effectively zooms in on a specific region of the tree, and the overall context for the tree is lost.

For this project, I created a tree of Florida bird families, based on the information on the Tree of Life website. To help people with unfamiliar families, there was a thumbnail photo of a representative species and a short fact about each family on the tree.

Viewers could click on a node to "open up" a branch.

Viewers were presented with a complete tree (so they didn’t lose the overview of the entire tree), and had the ability to select one node with its connected species to highlight at one time (thus maintaining the importance of reading by nodes).

Example of an "open" branch.
The overall non-interactive tree. All photos open-source from Wikipedia.

My experiment worked like this: 1) viewers read a description of how to read a phylogenetic tree, 2) they either interacted with a dynamic tree or viewed a static tree, 3) were asked to draw the tree from memory, and 4) answered some questions about themselves and the tree. They weren’t told ahead of time that they would have to draw the tree from memory. In my next post, I’ll talk about what actually happened…

Categories
birds Florida outdoors

Hiking Paynes Prairie Preserve

It’s been a while since I posted, so I thought I should try to get something up here… I did pass my first candidacy exam (yay!), and am getting ready for exam #2 right now (on the public understanding of science material I blogged about earlier). I’ve also started to working on my reading for my last reading list, so I’ll be starting to post those summaries shortly.

For now, I’ll mention my excursion last weekend to Gainesville, to Paynes Prairie Preserve. This is a state park with a wide range of habitat, including oak uplands, pine flatwoods, and the eponymous prairie. Which was actually quite shrubby, rather than grassy, which surprised me. I was mainly three looking for birds, and the visibility was really limited by the head-height vegetation. But there were definitely a lot of birds around. Overall, it was a great day- not too hot, sunny but shady in the woods, and a light breeze.

I hiked on two trails: Cone’s Dike and Bolen Bluffs. Cone’s Dike goes through oak forest before heading onto the prairie proper. I did see a lot of birds, and a few deer. Bolen Bluff heads through similar habitat (though the different types of oaks), and terminates at an observation deck (more on that later).

Paynes Prairie is known for its feral horses, supposedly descended from Ponce DeLeon’s expedition to find the Fountain of Youth. In reality, they’re escaped from more recent ranchers. I did run into three of them- two mares and a half-grown foal. I was a little leery of approaching them closely, but other people were going right up to them taking photos. I will say that the ground contained copious evidence of horse passage (and also bobcat territory marking), which was pretty evident given that we have not been getting much rain lately. Yes, there was a lot of poo lying around.

In terms of birds, I saw a flock of turkeys, and a number of raptors (including a sharp-shinned hawk being mobbed by blue jays, bald eagles, red-shouldered hawk, and northern harrier). There were also a number of wood storks, some sandhill cranes calling, and a bunch of smaller species. I also saw a baby (pencil-sized) ribbon snake, and a more intimidating cottonmouth who was extremely casual about moving off the trail when it saw me.

from Wikipedia

The only jarring note was running into some UF students (or so I assumed from their Gator-themed clothing) having sex on the observation platform. I must assume they were there in order to be seen, because after all they were on top of a platform on a prairie. I must say that I’ve never run into people having sex in public while hiking before, and didn’t expect it in that visible of a spot- and the destination of the trail. I also wouldn’t have expected them to notice me, confer for a moment, then just keep on going (more loudly). Given that I was hiking alone, I wasn’t sure how to react, and just ended up walking back the way I came.

That episode made me think about the intimidation inherent in that sort of exhibitionism- it’s not like they were in a tent at night or in a really secluded area, so presumably they wanted to be seen, and were expecting not to be confronted about their activities. Or maybe they wanted a confrontation? Alternatively, they might get their kicks out of asserting their right to do whatever they want to wherever they want to, while sending a big “fuck you” to other people trying to use a public park. Would they have stopped if I had been a man? Or if I had been in a group? What if there had been a family with kids? What if I’d pulled out a camera and started taking pictures?

At any rate, it definitely made me conscious of my status as a woman hiking alone- not as scarily as if I’d been in a more secluded location, but enough to really be upsetting. Granted, there are much more dangerous situations to encounter while hiking while female, but this was plenty troubling. Confronting them wasn’t really a good option, but neither was waiting them to finish up before using the viewing platform to look for birds. So I turned around and walked away. A frankly shitty end to what had otherwise been a good day of hiking.

Categories
birds Florida outdoors

Hiking Econlockhatchee Sandhills

Today, we went on our first hike of the semester. Yes, the semester is halfway over, so it is a sad commentary on our general busyness level… We decided to check out a newish trail (at least new to us), the Econlockhatchee Sandhill Conservation Area. It’s located east of UCF, in unincorporated Orange County, near the intersection of Lake Pickett and Tanner Rds.

It’s now in the low 80’s, so great hiking weather. This hike would have been pretty brutal in the shadeless spots in the summer- it’s partly shaded. The conservation area includes patches of sandhill scrub, pine flatwoods, and some riparian forest (though the trail doesn’t take you to the river). There were some nice open oak woodland areas with lichen on the ground, and some cool old snags that I bet would make great hawk perches (didn’t see any, though).

The trail goes through mixed pine and oak forest, then cuts through a treeless area, before getting back into the patchy pines and oaks for the long loop. There were several types of oak trees, some pines, and a wider variety of trees near the entrance. Since it was about 1 pm, there wasn’t a lot of wildlife up and about, but we did hear what we assume were a bunch of armadillos trundling through the saw palmettos. We did see a few birds- I’ll put my list at the end of this post. There were raccoon and armadillo tracks- didn’t see deer tracks, though they are definitely around.And more butterflies than I expected to see, including a bunch of nice looking swallowtails.

The trail was well-marked, and there were a number of old roads that you could probably take in addition to the trail. If you wanted to get to the river, these roads are probably your best bet. Overall, it was nice to just get out and enjoy the day.

Birds: black vultures, turkey vultures, red-shouldered hawk (heard), turkeys (heard), 2 falcons (probably peregrine, but way overhead), Carolina wren, eastern phoebe, tufted titmice (2 noisy flocks), mockingbirds, American robin, Northern cardinal, blue-gray gnatcatchers, downy woodpecker, red-bellied woodpeckers, palm warblers, prairie warbler, black & white warbler, possible brown thrasher

Categories
birds exam readings learning theory public participation in science

Exam readings: Public participation in science

Citizen science projects like those at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology are an important venue for science communication. These two papers evaluate whether and what project participants learned about science as a process during two of these projects.

First: Deborah Trumbull, Rick Bonney, Derek Bascom & Anna Cabral. “Thinking Scientifically During Participation in a Citizen-Science Project.” Science Education 84 (2000): 265-275.

Summary: One assumption of citizen science projects is that participants will think more scientifically after participating; this paper analyzes letters written by cit. sci. participants to see whether this is the case. People participated in a bird seed preference test; they received a kit with information on scientific method/process, and instructions for the experiment mentioned that they would be learning about the process of inquiry. Demographics of participants: they tended to be older, well-educated, white, and had positive attitudes about and interest in science. Survey results suggested that, after participation, participants didn’t have changed levels of scientific knowledge. The authors decided to analyze the many unsolicited letters received from participants to look for evidence of inquiry (e.g., clearly identifying problems or hypotheses, designing an experiment, changing procedures if necessary, and analyzing and interpreting the results.) Some people did demonstrate inquiry, but not many (especially consistent observation, changing methods when not working, hypothesis formation.) They conclude that more explicit education about the process of inquiry is probably necessary for people to actually try it out. They also highlight some other potential problems with cit. sci. projects, e.g., people not understanding the point of pooling consistent data from a wide geographic area, or the relationship between prior knowledge and a formal research question.

Comments: The main conclusion here is that citizen science projects do have the potential to increase inquiry, but that it probably has to be emphasized in the instructional materials. Another possibility is that more localized or community-based citizen science projects might promote inquiry through a higher level of interaction (though this might have to be guided in some way…)

Links to: Roth & Lee (measure scientific literacy differently in citizen science projects); Brossard et al. (assessment of learning/attitudes about science in another CLO project)

Second, Dominique Brossard, Bruce Lewenstein, and Rick Bonney. “Scientific Knowledge and Attitude Change: The Impact of a Citizen Science Project.” International Journal of Science Education. 27.9 (2005): 1099–1121. Print.

Summary: Presents an analysis of the learning of participants in the Neighborhood Nestwatch Project (Cornell Lab of Ornithology). This project asked participants to put up nest boxes and report data about birds that used them using standardized protocols. Participants received protocol information, info about bird biology, and practical info about nest boxes; they were also encouraged to interact with CLO staff electronically or via phone. The project had a dual emphasis: collecting wide range of nesting data and increasing participant knowledge and change attitudes. Using a framework of experiential education, authors predicted that bird knowledge and knowledge about scientific inquiry would increase. Using the Elaboration Likelihood Model (increased attention activates persuasion), they predicted that there would be an increase in positive attitudes toward science and the environment. They found that attitudes toward science and the environment didn’t change (science-beliefs might have been more complex than test questions, or lack of emphasis in educational materials; environment-may have been high to begin with). While knowledge of bird biology increased, knowledge about the scientific process did not (they attribute this to both the level of emphasis of these things in educational materials and participant interest).

Comments: The authors recommend that more emphasis should be made on the scientific context in order to directly increase understanding of science and inquiry. This seems to be a common issue with citizen science projects- people participate with certain interests in mind, and generally this is not to learn more about the scientific process.

Links to: Trumbull et al. (CLO project); Roth & Lee (perspective of science literacy as a communal thing, making it ineffective/inappropriate to test individuals’ knowledge for citizen science projects)