Category: Science Education

Student Helps Songbirds Take Flight

- Wendy St. John Leave a comment

Originally posted in the Sonoma State Star; reproduced here in its entirety as it is no longer available on the newspaper’s website. (Archival information here: http://library.sonoma.edu/specialcollections/ssuarchives/studentnewspaper/student-helps-songbirds-take-flight).

By Ronald Pierce

When Sonoma State University senior Wendy St. John is not playing video games or spending time with her son, she volunteers her time at The Songbird Hospital (SBH) based in Sebastopol, CA.

St. John, a biology major focusing on ecology and evolutionary biology, began volunteering at the SBH two years ago for director Veronica Bowers, who runs the SBH on her home property. The organization operates on the US Fish and Wildlife and California Department of Fish and Game licenses of Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue.

St. John plans to return to SSU after her upcoming graduation to receive her master’s degree, and is currently working on an ongoing project with assistant professor Nicholas Geist involving western pond turtles.

“I started really young. My mom rescued and raised birds at home back in the 70’s – that’s not legal,” said St. John, describing the beginnings her lifelong passion for birds as well as other animals. “I’ve just always loved birds.”

St. John was volunteering with Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue when she discovered a sickly, baby crow that she took to Bowers at the SBH. Having heard of Bowers’ work but never visited, she took the opportunity to drop by.

“My poor baby crow died; he had intestinal parasites,” said St. John.

The SBH specializes in the care of passerines, a wide classification of songbirds based on vocal structure that includes sparrows, finches, swallows, crows and ravens, although the SBH does not care for crows and ravens. Over 500 injured, orphaned and ill birds pass through the SBH every year from both local and migratory species.

“Our birds don’t get the same care in bigger hospitals for their specialized needs,” said St. John. The SBH works with the small, fragile birds that require more intense care than the average creature.

Babies, which arrive en mass in the season between May and August, require feeding every 30 minutes to two hours while still young. Other jobs St. John performs at the SBH include cleaning the outdoor aviaries, basic medical examinations, releases, and management in Bowers’ absence. An average week for a volunteer, like St. John, between May and August is four to ten hours of work in one or two shifts.

“Cliff swallows, like the ones at SSU, are Veronica’s favorite,” said St. John about the flock of cliff swallows that nest annually on the outside of Salazar Hall. “Their mud nests may have babies already.”

The birds build their dried mud nests on the high walls due to the similarities to the cliffs for which the birds are named. The school is very cooperative with the birds, only washing down the nests after they have all flown south for the winter to prevent the growth of parasites, as it is illegal to destroy the nests of native birds in a way that would interfere with breeding.

Bowers said that several cliff swallow babies pass through her hospital from SSU each year, saying that any cliff swallow baby old enough to leave its nest should already be able to fly. In any other case, the baby will need care as soon as possible.

Bowers spoke highly of St. John as one of her key team members.

“Wendy’s strong intelligence in the natural world and academic studies are an asset to our work at the SBH,” said Bowers. “Her high energy and good humor is a welcome aspect of her personality when getting work done.”

The Song Bird Hospital, located at 8050 Elphick Rd. in Sebastopol, welcomes all potential volunteers. Those interested should visit their website at www.songbirdhosptial.com. Any student who finds a baby bird should call the SBH at 707-484-6504 and not attempt to care for the bird themselves.

Richard Dawkins – Beware the Believers

- Wendy St. John Leave a comment

This is my one of my favorite YouTube videos. The song is catchy, and it’s SO freaking hilarious, especially if you’re familiar with arguments about evolution vs “intelligent design.” This came out, IIRC, around the time of the Scienceblogs kerfuffle about the film “Expelled,” and honestly, I don’t know if it’s meant to lampoon ID creationists or Richard Dawkins and other atheist scientists (including P.Z. Myers and Eugenie Scott who are “featured” in the video) – but it does a great job of poking fun at both sides. Best of all, hip hop Charles Darwin! As someone who identifies as a methodological materialist (but not a philosophical one), I adore this video. Geeky science humor doesn’t get any better than this.

 

A Big Decision

- Wendy St. John Leave a comment

As of 2:15 this afternoon, I am on WINTER BREAK! WHOO HOO!!! This seems like a good time to do a round-up of the classes I took last semester, and some other noteworthy activities.

One of the big themes this semester was evolution – and it’s funny just how much overlap there was with all of the classes I took. Which was good – I got a lot of reinforcement of topics, and there was a lot of material that I only had to learn once, and it got me through four different classes:

Animal Behavior, with Dr. Dan Crocker. I enjoyed this class – it was an upper division lecture class, with no lab, all about – you guessed it – animal behavior. We talked a lot about reproduction, and evolutionary concepts. I really like Dr. Crocker; he does his research on elephant seals, and he seems like a genuinely nice and funny guy. Plus, animal behavior is cool! We got to look at loads of pictures, and a few videos, of animals doing really interesting things.

Evolution, with Dr. Derek Girman. I feel like I really have some of these concepts down now, especially natural selection, the geologic timescale, and game theory. I can calculate the hell out allele frequencies, as well, and tell you if a population is in Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium. Plus, I adore Dr. Girman. He’s my advisor, and he and I have spent a lot of time together outside of class this semester, because of some of my student representative activites, so I feel like I’ve gotten to know him (or, more importantly, that he’s gotten to know me) a bit more this semester. One of the things we did in Evolution was a group project in lab. The assignment was to create a game that illustrated evolutionary concepts. My lab partner and I came up with an AWESOME card game – it was so good that Dr. Girman asked if he could keep it, to use with his Vertebrate Biology class next semester (a class I’ll be taking, and I am SUPER excited).

Macroevolution, with Dr. Nick Geist. This was a graduate seminar, so it was a lot more laid-back than my other classes. We read papers and then sat around and discussed them. Each person in the class was required to choose a macroevolutionary topic, choose a couple of relevant scientific papers for the class to read on the subject, come up with a powerpoint presentation to give to the class, and then lead the discussion. The topic I chose was the evolution of flight, and I worked with another woman in the class to put together the presentation. I thought we put together a really good presentation – we talked about the four times (that we know of) that flight has evolved (insects, pterosaurs, birds and bats), and then talked in more detail about the evolution of bird flight controversy. (Did they evolve from dinosaurs? Or NOT)? That was fun, and Dr. Geist seemed to really appreciate the presentation we put together. As with Dr. Girman, I feel like I got to know Dr. Geist better this semester, which turns out to be SUPER important, considering a big decision I made last week. Oh, and our final exam? Took place at a local dive bar (The 8 Ball), where we shot pool and played the pub quiz machine and then went out for hamburgers. Totally cool. 🙂

Paleontology, with Dr. Matt James (in the Geology Department). This is probably the single class I have most wanted to take throughout my entire life . . . and it turned out to be a disappointment. Which is okay. I still love paleontology. But this class? Didn’t love, for reasons I don’t want to put into print at this time. One of the factors, though, was that we only covered invertebrates – which meant NO dinosaurs. Can you imagine a paleontology course with no dinosaurs? No? Neither could I, until now. It’s not that I minded learning about the inverts. Trilobites are freaking adorable, and we took a pretty awesome field trip down to Death Valley where we went fossil hunting, and I found a BUNCH of trilobite fossils, as well as some brachiopods, dendrites, oncolites and scolithos fossils. So, there were good things about it. In any case, it’s behind me now, and I needed it for my Paleo minor, so it was totally worth it for that reason alone. But, still. NO DINOSAURS! 🙁

The other thing I did this semester was begin the research for my senior thesis, which I’m doing in Dr. Geist’s lab. In a nutshell, I’m doing research on Western Pond Turtles, and I spent a bunch of time over the summer at our field site up in Lake County, and during the semester I started working with my data. I’m studying the nesting preferences, and possible nest site fidelity of females – whether or not they return to the same site year after year to lay their eggs. It is super cool, and leads me to my big decision . . .

I’m going to grad school. I’ve decided to stay at Sonoma State to earn a Master’s Degree in Wildlife Biology – there are a bunch of reasons I want to do this, but the thing that really clinched it for me was looking at job postings for the type of work I want to do, and realizing that a B.S. will land me an entry-level position, and I’d have to spend a couple of years working my way up the ladder. On the other hand, I’ll be qualified to go directly into higher level jobs with an M.S., especially since I’ll be able to develop a lot of contacts and relationships with professionals in the field during the course of my studies.

Oh! And I also wanted to talk a bit about the big extracurricular thing I did. Last semester, the Biology Club elected me to be the student representative for the Biology Department, so I’ve been doing that this semester (and will continue next semester as well). Which means I attend all the faculty meetings, which is very interesting, and I’ve had some opportunities to work on additional projects, as well.

 

Early in the semester, I learned about a possible collaboration between SSU and the city of Fort Bragg, who wants to donate some land to SSU as a research/nature/education center facility. A committee was formed to find out if there was enough interest among campus departments to try and make this happen, and I volunteered to be part of this, so I was appointed by the ASI president to represent SSU students on the committee. If the project goes ahead (which I very much hope it will), it will be called the Noyo Center for Science and Education at Fort Bragg. It was a really good experience for me to be on this committee – I wrote a survey which was sent out to as many students as possible, gauging their interest in the project, and then I wrote the “Student Response” page of a document which was given to the school’s Provost, in the hopes of convincing him this would be a good collaboration for SSU to pursue.

The other big thing I’ve done this semester as student rep is my involvement in curricular revision. For a variety of reasons, the Biology Department has decided to completely, from the ground up, revamp its curriculum. Right now, there are a lot of classes in the catalog that never get taught, and some classes that aren’t offered regularly enough for students who need them for their concentrations. Plus, the make-up of the faculty is different now that it was when the current curriculum was created, so overall, its a good time to start from scratch and come up with something that will better serve the needs of students and the department.

 

When they started talking about this in faculty meetings, I let them know that I’d be more than willing to help in whatever way I could with this process – I thought having some student input could only be a good thing. Most of the faculty members agreed with this, and were really supportive of me being part of this process (particularly Dr. Girman, who chairs the curriculum committee). There were a few faculty members who weren’t quite so keen on the idea of a student being involved . . . but I think I’ve mostly won them over. At least no one has been dismissive of me or my ideas during the two faculty retreats I’ve attended.

 

I created a student survey asking questions that we decided would be helpful in deciding what direction to take with a new curriculum, and I’m also sitting on the committee which is working on a recommendation for Upper Division curriculum. We’ll be meeting on Monday to try and come up with some sort of a general plan, and I think it will be a good meeting – I like all the faculty members on my committee (which is why I chose it :D).

So, all in all, I’ve spent a LOT of time in meetings this semester, between weekly faculty meetings and various committee meetings. But I think it has been really beneficial for me. I enjoy being involved, but even more important, it means that the faculty and the staff are getting to know me . . . and, from what I’m hearing from a couple of reliable sources, I’m making a very good impression on people (part of the reason I’ve decided to stay at SSU for grad school).

So, that’s my semester in a (rather gigantic) nutshell.

Turtle Research

- Wendy St. John 1 Comment
Since I am pursuing a bachelor of science degree, I will be writing a senior thesis. Of course, this means that I first need to do some research, so I have something about which to write. It looks like that something will be turtles, more specifically the nesting preferences and nest site fidelity of western pond turtles. I spent a a good part of last summer doing field research at a site up in Lake County, and this semester I am working in the lab with the data we collected, but for my own project, and also for a continuing project on temperature-dependent sex detemination in turtles.

This all came about last semester when i was speaking with my advisor about possibilities for senior thesis topics. Dr. Derek Girman, my advisor, suggested that i speak with Dr. Nick Geist, as he does the kind of vertebrate stuff that interests me (he is also a paleontologist, which is also stuff that I love). As it happened, while Dr. Girman and i were talking about this, Dr. Geist walked by and saw us talking – he must have had a psychic moment because he veered over to join us, and a couple of minutes later he’d agreed to help me come up with a project in his lab. A couple of weeks later, he invited me to be part of one of his big research projects and join the Turtle Team. Dr. Geist is one of my favorite professors, and I was thrilled to be accepted into his lab as an undergrad!

After some discussion, we decided that I would work on nest site fidelity – whether or not females return to the same location year after year to nest. I’m also interested in whether or not they return to their natal sites – the place where they themselves were born – but that might be outside then scope of what in will be able to research given the time I have to work on this project.

So, over the summer, I spent a lot of time up in Lake County at our research site, helping one of the grad students with her project, and also beginning to collect data of my own. The main project involved tracking females who had come out of the water to nest. Sometimes, we just followed them and monitored them while they were nesting so we could get a count of their eggs afterward. (Later, the eggs were removed to be incubated in our lab to be head-started by one of the local zoos and released about a year from now). Sometimes, we tracked them using radio telemetry equipment – we glued transmitters to their backs, and then tracked them to their nests that way. Mostly, the work involved tromping around a really beautiful location up in Lake County, grabbing up turtles (who almost always peed on us when we picked them up), and keeping track of the nests they laid. I also collected soil samples from all nest sites, and got GPS data for nest locations. Since most of the work took place in the early evening (we were usually in the field from about four in the afternoon until nine or ten at night), so we camped overnight instead of making the long drive home. Super fun!

We went up there a couple of days a week during June, until the end of the nesting season. Later in the summer, we went back up to help collect eggs, and also to release the baby turtles who had hatched last yes, and been raised in zoos. That was also lot of fun, except my boots kept getting stuck in the mud.

Now that the semester has started, there isn’t any field work until next year, so I’m working with data – plotting my location coordinates on a map and eventually I’ll get down to analyzing my soil samples. Dr. Geist wants me to put together a poster and present it next year at a conference, so I’ll be working on that, too, eventually. OH YEAH TURTLES!

A Photo of Me!

- Wendy St. John 1 Comment

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If you’re wondering about the black thing on the turtle’s back, it’s a radio transmitter. This gravid female had been captured the night before and given an ID number, weighed and measured, and fitted with a transmitter. Then, she spent the night in my car. This photo was taken right before she was released back into the lake the next morning. Then, over the next few days, her radio frequency was monitored each evening in the hopes of finding her out of the water and laying her eggs.

Dissections in Vert Morph – For Science!

- Wendy Leave a comment

(Post backdated to 2010, when these photos were originally taken). 

Dissections nearly scared me away from biology. No kidding, when I first graduated from high school, I considered going into biology, but I always vetoed the idea, because I was convinced I’d never be able to handle dissecting an animal that had once been alive.

This wasn’t a new thought . . . when I was in elementary school (around 4th grade, IIRC), as part of the gifted/talented program, we were asked to dissect frogs. I decided that I wouldn’t do it, and told the teacher as much. Fortunately for my young psyche, this wasn’t a problem – they even allowed me to take the (living) frog home as a pet.

Fast forward a couple of decades, when I realized that I wanted to do something tangible to help the state of the Earth. Conservation work seemed the most direct way to do this, and biology seemed to be the most direct way to get involved with conservation. I knew that dissections would be in my future, but I figured I could handle it. After all, I’d given birth. It didn’t seem like dissecting something could be more intense than that. I’d do it, for science!

Finally, the opportunity arrived in Vertebrate Evolutionary Morphlogy, which I needed to compete the Evolution and Ecology concentration for my major. I was a bit nervous, but when the time came, I was surprised to find that it wasn’t nearly as difficult as I’d anticipated.We dissected two animals during the course of the semester – the first was a dogfish shark, and the second was a cat. Admittedly, the cat was tricky at first, but once we’d removed the skin it stopped seeming like something that could once have been a pet, and was instead an interesting collection of connected muscles, and bones, and nerves, and other tissues. Sure, there were bad smells, but more than anything, it was interesting. Really, really interesting to cut something open and see how it’s put together inside. To follow the muscles, and nerves. To see how the lens fits into an eye. For science!

Since then, I’ve done other things I would have once found distasteful – I’ve pinned dozens and dozens of insects, dissected squids and earthworms, filed notches into the shells of baby turtles, cut up mice and rats into bite-sized pieces for animals in my care. Occasionally, I have moments when I feel like a bit of a monster, even now, if I have to cut up a live mealworm for one of my lizards. But mostly, things like this don’t bother me anymore.

I’m doing them for science.

 

Biology Field Trip

- Wendy St. John Leave a comment

Here are some photos from a field trip that I took back in April to the Fairfield-Osborn Preserve in Rohnert Park, a nature preserve that is owned and maintained by SSU. It was a field trip for my Diversity, Structure and Function class, a class which gave a systematic overview of the whole range of life on Earth, from bacteria through plants and animals. Cool class. 🙂

For our field trip, we just went out to the preserve and tried to identify as many different organisms as we could, armed with all the knowledge we’d (hopefully) gained during the course of the semester. Here are a few of my favorite things that we saw that day:

Western Fence Lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis)

Me holding the lizard:

A scorpion (maybe the California Forest Scorpion, Uroctonus mordax?). OMG SO COOL! I didn’t know until fairly recently that we had scorpions up here. But we just turned over rocks until we found this little guy. Adorable!

Pacific Chorus Frog (Pseudacris regilla). Also incredibly adorable:

Another view of the chorus frog:

A California Slender Salamander (Batrachoseps attenuatus). It’s amazing the cool creatures that can be found under rocks!

Spring Break Fun!

- Wendy St. John Leave a comment

We’ve been on Spring Break this past week (later than just about everyone else, it seems), and the Bio Club at school (of which I am a member) had some fun activities planned. We went on two of them – a trip to a wild animal park called Safari West, and tidepooling at Pinnacle Gulch, near Bodega Bay. I also did a couple of other local things – I did some honest-to-goodness scientific research, counting pollinators on a species of wildflower that grows only at vernal pools, and I fed the animals at the wildlife rescue. Here are some photos from the two most photogenic adventures:

We went to Safari West on Wednesday, and it was a great day. I took a bunch of photos, and it was nice to have the camera out. It had been a while since I’d done any photography, what with being so busy with school.

At the park, we were given a walking tour, and then a two-hour tour on the safari truck, where we drove through the park, which has been arranged to have the animals in as natural a habitat as possible, and the truck goes into the “enclosures” (some of which are several acres large). It was a really cool place, and best of all we got in for free, because the woman who gave us our tour is a member of the Bio Club.

Here are a few of my favorite photos taken at the park:

A ring-tailed Lemur (pregnant, maybe?):

Ring-tailed Lemur

A whistling duck – these guys were so cute, all of us loved them:

Whistling Duck

Cheetah (and no, we didn’t go in this enclosure):

Cheetah

East African Crowned Cranes:

East African Crowned Cranes

Cape Buffalo:

Cape Buffalo

White Rhinoceros:

White Rhinoceros

Chapman’s Zebra:

Chapman's Zebra

Not sure what these are, but they’re pretty:

On Thursday, a bunch of us went tidepooling at a really pretty little secluded beach just south of Bodega Bay. We had to walk a half-mile to get there along a poison oak-infested trail (and of course, it was harder work going back up on the way back to the car at the end of the day), but it was totally worth it. It was a great beach, and we got there about half an hour before low tide, so we had plenty of time to explore the pools, looking for invertebrates. Here are a few photos taken at Pinnacle Gulch:

Pinnacle Gulch

Sea Star (although I still think of them as Starfish):

Sea Star

My son and Kate from Bio Club:

Connor and K8

Anemone:

Anemone

Bat Star:

Bat Star

Kate and a big crab:

K8 and a Crab