Hello! I am a PhD student at the University of Wyoming studying the population genetics of hummingbirds, and I am looking for new sites to band, sample, and release Broad-tailed and Calliope Hummingbirds in Colorado. We look for home owners with busy feeders who are willing to host us for a day or two (we bring a travel trailer), set up feeder net traps, capture, ID species-age-sex, examine for diseases, place a tiny federal ID band on leg, collect an even tinier blood sample, give a final sugar water treat, then release. We provide information to the home owner host about the birds we captured at their place and updates about our study. We use the blood sample for DNA for my PhD population genomics studies (Broad-tailed) to identify population structure, genetic diversity, adaptive genetics, cryptic hybrids, gene flow, and more. I use blood from all hummingbird species for hemoparasite studies – to answer what is the prevalence and parasite species distribution of malarial-type blood parasites in our WY and CO hummingbirds. We’re building our Calliope sample base for future genomic studies. We have a paper accepted and coming out soon on CA hummingbird blood parasites; another one on corvid hemoparasites (on our website below, click publications). Our banding site home-owner hosts are typically very excited to watch the process, learn about the hummingbirds they have, and be engaged in science. We spent much of last summer throughout parts of WY and a few sites in CO, and now I am hoping to fill out my geographic sampling with a few more locations in Colorado. We are hoping to find locations especially in northern and western Colorado. Do you have or know people with busy hummingbird feeders that would be interested in helping us? Please send me an email! My contact information and research website is below. Thanks for any ideas and contacts!
______________ Brady Godwin PhD student Program in Ecology, University of Wyoming Wildlife Genomics and Disease Ecology Lab www.wildlifegenetichealth.org (307) 766-6638 [email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Colorado Birds" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cobirds/3f16b8f6-bdd5-414c-a3fa-7ea806c8e5e3%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
