Archives: Field and Travel

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

The Hummingbird Festival in Sedona

I just got back from the Hummingbird Festival in Sedona, Arizona. It was an honour to be invited there to present our work on flight. Photo by Maria Mahar at www.hummingbirdpictures.net The audience at the festival had a ton of great questions and I learned a lot. For example, the Anna’s hummingbirds are a fairly recent... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Peacock Day

Saturday, March 25 was Peacock Day at the Los Angeles Arboretum. I was looking forward to giving a talk at this event for months because it was a chance to return to my stomping grounds at the best time of year. The event had guided peacock walks, peacock-themed art activities, sitar music, and an Indian... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

SICB Portland

Here is the poster we presented at SICB Portland last week on the biomechanics of peacock displays (click to enlarge): I think it turned out pretty well, although I’m not sure it could stand alone without an interpreter. We had a constant stream of awesome visitors. My coauthor Suzanne brought feathers and a model... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

A bad year for birds

June 2013 was bad for tree swallows. At the Queen’s University Biological Station, over 90% of nests failed as a result of persistent cold, rainy weather. This happened to be the same year we were conducting an experiment on the hormonal mechanisms of parental care in these birds. The bad weather made for a... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Life in LA

The Los Angeles Arboretum is one of the most beautiful places I have been. Where else can you see six species of hummingbird zooming from perch to flower, an Asian red-whiskered bulbul nesting beside a dancing peacock, with noisy flocks of parakeets commuting overhead? Even the introduced species (on this list, all but the... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Hipsters who hunt

An update on a previous post: my good friends Martin and Vanya are the official poster boys of a new movement. Collecting oyster mushrooms north of Kingston. Photo by Charlie Croskery. Read about it here, as told by Vanya’s sister-in-law, Emma Marris. It’s a great article. Charlie took the photos at the Croskery farm (more... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Chicken of the trees

This month has been an eye-opener for me. Two weeks ago, I was rubbing shoulders with animal rights activists. One week later, I was hunting at the Croskery farm. And last night, we dined on the spoils – a fantastic squirrel stew that gave Thanksgiving dinner a run for its money. How did it... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Peacocking on Parliament Hill

Here’s my poster from the Evolution conference in Ottawa: The colours are a bit off in this shrunken version, but you can download a larger PDF version here. The poster covers some of my work on the lesser-known green peacock (a close relative of the familiar blue variety). Green and blue peafowl have markedly different body colours,... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Innovative, naturally

Chandra Rodgers sampling bluegill sunfish on Lake Opinicon. This spring I had the opportunity to write a feature article on the Queen’s University Biological Station, a site just north of Kingston where researchers have a long history of major scientific breakthroughs involving modest Ontario wildlife. Several of these discoveries have proved to... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Life imitates [filmmaking] art

Congratulations to Myra Burrell – her peacockumentary has been short-listed for the Animal Behavior Society’s film festival! Myra, a veteran of the natural history film program at the University of Otago in New Zealand, traveled to California with me in 2010. She helped with peacock field work, capturing more females than anyone thought... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

How I learned to respect the peahen

Written for the Los Angeles Arboretum. Meep meep? More like “Honk honk!” Arboretum regulars will no doubt recognize the call of a startled peahen, but you may not be aware of the clever ways they use it. Not that they try to boast or taunt the enemy, necessarily, but I’m starting to think that... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Furious about eyespots

I think I flubbed an interview this week. My supervisor Bob and I just published a paper that is getting some press, because it addresses a recent controversy about the peacock’s train1. Eager for the interview with Nature News, I wasn’t exactly prepared with good lines for the reporter to go on – and I... More

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