Transcript
[00:00:00] Andony Melathopoulos: It's true. Sometimes I look over the fence at the ornithologist and I'm a little bit envious. Birds are fascinating. Their diversity is remarkable. They have strange and cookie habits. And in addition, there's this huge group of birders that are committed to generating data on the occurrence and behavior of birds.
[00:00:23] I hope one day that, the study of insect pollinators will somehow reach this level that birding is at. And I was excited to learn about a project out of the Cornell lab of ornithology that is looking to help out. To take that vast amount of bird data and use it as a bio indicator potentially of where pollinating insects are located and what they're doing.
[00:00:46] I had the good opportunity to talk to Dr. Josie Russo this week about this project. She's a post-doctoral fellow at the Cornell lab of ornithology. And she's going to tell us a little bit about the where this project is at and some of the methodologies they're using and how this data could be used.
[00:01:03] And at the end of that episode, she gives us these wonderful insight on some of the hummingbirds of the Pacific Northwest. I'm always squeamish that we don't have a good episode on hummingbirds, but one will be coming soon. But also a quick announcement. March 5th is the eighth annual BV pollinator conference, the largest pollinator conference in the Pacific Northwest region.
[00:01:28] It's a great place to learn about how you can do gardening or small farming to help pollinators. Here I have it on good authority. Keynote speaker is going to be Alivia messenger, Carol, from the bees in your backyard. You don't want to miss this as only $30 early registration is recommended. I'm going to put the link to the event in the show notes.
[00:01:49] And without further ado, let's go to Joe's neighbor. So to hear about the birds and the bees this week on pollinate.
[00:01:53] Welcome to pollination. It's really great to have you here. One of, one of the kind of things that I'm most embarrassed about on this show is we've had almost 200 episodes and we've never had. Somebody who has worked with birds and it's birds are important pollinators, but
[00:02:11] Josee Rouseau: this is an honor.
[00:02:12] And you have birds that are,
[00:02:15] Andony Melathopoulos: I know, I actually can say I've got a flowering quince. That's just starting to flower outside and I've got a whole bunch of hummingbirds that are perched there. Yes, the Anna's
[00:02:27] Josee Rouseau: hummingbirds are around and they're very vocal.
[00:02:30] Andony Melathopoulos: I guess let's make that transition today. So I guess the thing that I'm really one thing I remember in a past episode, we had John, Dr.
[00:02:39] John Asher on from the who works on the world bee project out in Singapore. And he made this, he said that, insect, pollinator, biodiversity, Today is just coming into its own. It's almost, he said this it's almost at a place where bird ornithology was in the 1970s. And my sense when I, when he said that, I thought, oh, there's just been since the seventies, there's been a lot.
[00:03:03] And if we just fast forward to today, there's a lot of ways in which data occurrence data for birds is accumulated. Can you just give us a picture of. Give us a little look at the bird world on how people know where birds are and survey work and all that.
[00:03:16] Josee Rouseau: There's definitely a lot of ways to study the biodiversity and learn about the birds.
[00:03:21] Where are they are? What they do. We have database the one I'm working with is actually Ebola, which covers the entire world. It's data around the at any month of the year. And it's citizen scientists that look at their feeders and in enter the data. And this is being used by people like me, scientists like me that wants to look at patterns across, in my case, north America.
[00:03:45] But we also have other sets of data sets like the breeding bird surveys, which are more focused on the breeding birds. So during the summer, but this is a standardized protocol that has been running since 1969. And this is across the U S and Canada. And then we have others some bird bending data.
[00:04:04] If people want to learn about age and sex of the birds how many babies do produce every year. So those are different datasets that kind of focus on different time of the year, different aspect of the birds. But depending on the research question, they are available and have been available for many.
[00:04:21] Andony Melathopoulos: Just thinking about it, just get narrowing in, on just be occurrence data, not butterflies and other insects. It what's remarkable about that is with birds. It's not just where the bird was cited, but many aspects of its life history are recorded. So you have, not just, we know the range of this bird is here.
[00:04:42] We know the reproductive success would be going up or down, or all of that I guess has now captured as much.
[00:04:49] Josee Rouseau: Depending on the datasets. We know where they're breeding, whether or not breeding. We know how many of them are aware and if they're very abundant at certain time of the year versus other time of the year because birds, move around quite a
[00:05:02] Andony Melathopoulos: bit.
[00:05:04] Okay so this is great. So this is part of, this is this is perhaps what, people in the B world would aspire to in the future. But w you've taken an interesting tact here w in your research at Cornell university. And I guess one of the key aspects of this, as, perhaps leveraging this rich bird dataset to understand insect, pollinators and insect biodiversity.
[00:05:27] Why do you expect there to be any kind of correspondence between bird and insect biodiversity?
[00:05:32] Josee Rouseau: There's, I would say two main reasons that I see that are like most obvious. And we're focusing on one of them, I'll start with the other one. The one most people would think of is that birds are eating insects and some, they should be the two should be correlated in sick population, bird population.
[00:05:52] And in many cases they are. But when we focus obit more on bees, for example, there is not a lot of birds that are actually specializing on bees. That relationship is not as strong. I know of, for example, the summer tanager, which has evolved to. Focus on bees and wasps, but that's more of an exception in anything.
[00:06:15] So if we think all pollinators, yes, birds eat insects. But if we focus on bees, their relationship is not as Barrick. So the approach we're taking is that birds and bees and any pollinators really are likely affected by things that are common to both of them. There are both reliant on their environment.
[00:06:36] And so whatever is present in that environment is likely effecting both of them. So for example, intensity of land use the use of pesticides, the presence of certain habitat types, which both bees and birds maybe reliant on. And so if landscape attributes, specific landscape attributes are there, it could actually affect.
[00:07:01] The communities and birds in similar waves.
[00:07:05] Andony Melathopoulos: Okay. That makes sense. So you would expect, for example, where you might have a, a very intact plant community. There'd be a lot of, a lot of Burr, there'll be a lot of niches and a lot of birds and the same thing, reasonable to assume that might be the case also for pollinating inside.
[00:07:20] Josee Rouseau: Yes. So if we, for example, we have a lot of birds that focuses on open landscapes and they will maybe rely on some force in an area close to agriculture or pastures. And we have lots of bees that are like that. They like edges of forest sometimes because it's on this startup because there's more nesting habitats, but they like also the openness where there's like all the farmers growing.
[00:07:46] So maybe we have birds that are also affected by the same landscapes.
[00:07:49] Andony Melathopoulos: Oh, fascinating. I never thought about that, but men, there must be a whole host of birds that share very similar habitat types as well.
[00:07:59] Josee Rouseau: Exactly. And that's one of our interests. Can we look at data on birds and look at data on these and see if whenever we have a high richness, a high number of species of bees, is there some bird species that are actually typically.
[00:08:17] That whenever we cannot figure out the richness of bees. If we see that bird, we can assume that if that bird is present, maybe we can have a high richness of bees.
[00:08:29] Andony Melathopoulos: I do. So it's unlike the first the first approach that people take that there's some kind of functional. Interrelationship the birds eating, but it's more and looking at, there might be some life history overlaps and that'll last.
[00:08:44] Josee Rouseau: And so their life is straight. Exactly. That are similar between some of the bird species and many of the birds of the bee
[00:08:51] Andony Melathopoulos: species. Okay. I get it. So tell me a little bit about your approach. How do you do this? Imagine. Gathering, did you at this re one of the things that immediately comes to mind is you've got this really rich bird dataset, but then you've got this insect pollinator data set that's museum collections, spotty here, or there somebody.
[00:09:10] Josee Rouseau: Yeah. Which actually is the reason we started this project. We are aware that pollinators are decreasing and that the data are not as abundant as for bird data. And part of the question is okay at those places where we have good amount of the data and good amount of bird, data, Western relationship, so that all those places where there's less be data, but we have birth data, then we can, see if that if we can help the pollinator in directly by assessing what birds are there.
[00:09:42] Cause burns are a little bit easier to to monitor.
[00:09:45] Andony Melathopoulos: Okay. So you are, I imagine this involves coming through databases and databases, trying to find these sweet spots where you've got, this correspondence so that you can make predictions outward. Tell us a little bit about how you tell us a little bit about this process of database.
[00:10:03] Josee Rouseau: Yes. So this was a process, like you said, the first thing we looked at is what data are publicly available. And there's like a few sources, quite a few sources, but we wanted as much as possible data that span across the us, which was a little bit more difficult. So we had things like I naturalists like G Biff, which is global biodiversity.
[00:10:29] Oh, I wish I remembered a letter, but a lot of data goes into GBS. And then there was Stan, which is more focused on insects and stuff. It's I think it's scanned the dash bogs. Conduct org. I should
[00:10:46] Andony Melathopoulos: look into it. We will put it in the show notes, but this is the most interesting thing. Cause you and I were sitting by a microscope one day and you said you ever heard hear this?
[00:10:54] I said, no, I'd never heard of this. And it's really remarkable. Tell us a little bit about it.
[00:10:59] Josee Rouseau: So a lot of different organization, Dobrin mint, nonprofit museum from across the world, maybe more in north America, but really there's from across the world have uploaded their data and it's public. Available and it's free.
[00:11:15] And so there's I would say millions of records. I personally focus on data that's somewhat recent. So I was able to download about 1 million records or so of different pollinators, butterfly and bees and wasps and all of that. And then I scanned down a little bit more to the bees, but this is a really rich source of data that anybody could use.
[00:11:38] Okay,
[00:11:38] Andony Melathopoulos: so you, you've got all sorts of data. How do you do any is there any steps for kind of selecting, which you talked about date as being one of the things you don't want to know the world and the early 19 hundreds you want to know about it now? So what else, how else do you select the. Yeah.
[00:11:55] Josee Rouseau: So the first one, like you said, is the date, most of our eBird data, which I'm using, or I would say since 2010 to 2002 to now. And so I wanted to use be data that were a little bit more recent. So as well, since 2010, One of the things that was a major limiting factor, to be honest with you, in terms of the big data is I needed to be able to compare different places.
[00:12:21] And it's hard to compare places when you don't know how much surveying, how much effort each of those places have had. And so let's say we have a place in two different places in New York and one of them has had one survey. Of let's say three hours and the other one has had 10 surveys send surveys.
[00:12:43] If I don't know that one has had one survey and the other one 10, I cannot compare the richness of these.
[00:12:49] Andony Melathopoulos: You just see in the red, you just see a record of an occurrence and you may see a lot of them at one place in LA, but they've been sampling way more. And it stands to reason you sample more. You find
[00:13:01] Josee Rouseau: more.
[00:13:01] You find more bee species probably when you sample more. And so I needed to standardize the surveys by effort. I needed to know how many, how much effort, how much monitoring had been done at different places. So that if I had more bee species, I knew that. If it was because there was more of these species or because it was more surveys that was done there, I needed to break those two reasons apart.
[00:13:28] Andony Melathopoulos: How do you do that? That sounds like a tricky, without any records, nobody leaves a little note for you telling you what they did. How do you do that?
[00:13:36] Josee Rouseau: I had to actually filter that data sets for those that had effort, which was the sad part I had to ignore thousands and thousands of record.
[00:13:46] But the ones that I have that does have, number of pen traps, number of net hours, those are extremely high quality. And these data I could use actually to really assess the, be richness and compare different locations.
[00:14:06] Andony Melathopoulos: But I did cut you off in mid sentence, as I was asking that question, let's keep going.
[00:14:10] Josee Rouseau: So once I have be richness at different places and it's been standardized by the number of traps or by the number of nets, and I have the same thing with the birds, for the birds, we have that we listen to the birds and surveyed for 10 minutes.
[00:14:24] So I can really standardize the bird. To know what species are aware and in what abundance. And I can do the same thing to a certain level with the B data. So now I have a better idea that if there's a location with lots of B, I can really see, okay, what birds are there. Or what birds are absent when there's lots of bass, it could be, play both ways.
[00:14:48] And in, I can look at different locations and across the us to see if there's a pattern that comes
[00:14:54] Andony Melathopoulos: up. I just, I want to take a quick break before we get into your results, but how many locations did you end up? Have you ended up pulling out what are we looking at and what kind of coast to coast or.
[00:15:06] Josee Rouseau: So because the bee species and the bird species changes quite a bit across area, I decided at least for now to focus a little bit on the east coast, because that's where there's the most standardized B data. And so most of. This at least first step is focusing on Eastern bees and Eastern birds. And I got the garage, the location in the little cells of one kilometer radius.
[00:15:33] So these little area I have over a hundreds of them, maybe 150, I need to double check fairly,
[00:15:40] Andony Melathopoulos: fairly large. As a sort of proof of concept, you've got a nice large amount of location.
[00:15:46] Josee Rouseau: Yes, I do. I wish I had more, but yes. That's way better than nothing. Yes. And so this is what we're using at this point.
[00:15:54] We are at the point of developing gum into the ecology because not a lot of people have done exactly what we're trying to do. And we still need to validate or results.
[00:16:04] Andony Melathopoulos: No, that's good. Let's take it. Let's just take a break. I think I want to hear more about the data that the broad trends.
[00:16:10] I know this is preliminary data, but also how the data will be validated and how this will be turned into useful tools. So let's test take a quick break. We'll be back in a second with Dr. Joseph Russo. And now we're back. Okay. It was a very short break folks, but we've been having this conversation I've been taught talking with you.
[00:16:25] It's really the light cause in addition to sifting through data, you've actually, made your own B collection. Your P w you're a master of Mela tologist apprentice. Yeah we meet down in the at the microscope sessions, I'm working through my BS and you're working through your bees.
[00:16:40] Josee Rouseau: This has been such a fun process. I have studied birds for years now and these is all new to me. So I felt. That I needed to learn about how to identify them. What's their collegey. Where do they live? What did they do? And the participating in the Oregon, the Atlas has been like eye opening.
[00:17:00] I, I did a yard list, which I love, I have help with. I then find the bees and I have so much fun, like people that look at cute cat pictures. Now look at these under a microscope. This is so much better.
[00:17:14] Andony Melathopoulos: I'm glad you had that experience, but yeah, for me, it's always great. You especially with the microscope, you look at them, you get to see these strange features and, Lincoln pops up and he's oh, look at that.
[00:17:25] And it's oh,
[00:17:27] Josee Rouseau: these are way under appreciated. We need to get the word out there. Like birds are cute. I love birds. Don't get me wrong. But more people need to learn about bees.
[00:17:37] Andony Melathopoulos: I think this is a, I L I love your project because it really does bridge these two areas. And I also just love it because there, there are a real dedicated group of people generating the bird data and, the hope, at least here in Oregon is, we'll chip away at that a little bit and have something maybe a little bit more modest, but kin to that.
[00:17:56] And. Just coming back around to your work. So you earn the first stages. You've just, you've probably just assembled this database. You've got your locations. You've got your little grids popped up and I'm just wondering, are you how's it looking so far? I know you're really in early days of looking at the data, but it's, this broader question.
[00:18:14] Is there any correspondence?
[00:18:18] Josee Rouseau: Yeah. So I do have a data sets for the bees that data set for the burrs. And I've been able to look at link between the two and I'm starting to see a pattern, which is really interesting. So our next step will be to one validate the results, but what we're also very interested is that.
[00:18:36] These various species that we hope will be confirmed. What's their landscape, what's their habitat. And what's the habitat of the bees that are associated with those birds. So that whenever we pinpoint that landscape feature, we know that landscapes feature is associated with higher richness of bees and the specific bird species as well.
[00:19:00] Andony Melathopoulos: And I'm I imagine I w I imagine in the future, like if this works out, then it can really supplement native bee work. It may be, it w it can indicate where is a good site. I, was just on a meeting earlier today, but how do you prioritize sites for native bee sampling? And I can imagine something like this might give you some information as to where those.
[00:19:21] Our diverse hotspots are. And then, and you might just go in and focus your effort there, but how do you see this being applied? Beyond just that I mentioned that there's a lot of different applications. If this turns out to be true. Yeah.
[00:19:33] Josee Rouseau: Now you do bring a good point that's definitely one of them.
[00:19:36] Another one would be to when we think of pollinators, they're very important in food production. And so if we can help producer guide them and say, okay, these habitats features are very important for high richness of bees. We're hoping we can maybe go in that direction also and provide some habitat management guidance that would help.
[00:19:56] The bees specifically in agricultural, I also
[00:20:00] Andony Melathopoulos: really this approach because, when you talk to anybody doing restoration work, if you talk to NRCS, federal agencies that are tasked with conservation, they will often have multiple objectives. It would be really great if at the same time, as you're allocating resources for B in pollinator restoration, and you're also helping bird populations or vice versa.
[00:20:23] Yeah, no,
[00:20:23] Josee Rouseau: I think that the two are linked for sure, but really our goal is to see what's the, can the bird be an indicator of bee communities? And can we help the bee pollinator population go back up a little bit with the data, the huge amount of data we have on birds. So it might, it probably will help the birds too, but really we're hoping to help the pollinators at this.
[00:20:45] Andony Melathopoulos: Last question I have is you talked about validation, steps. How will you validate this model? How will we know? I guess you're you have these study sites. That the intent is to be able to make predictions beyond the study sites. Tell us a little bit about that process.
[00:20:58] Josee Rouseau: So apparently this process will be to look at.
[00:21:02] Comparing the bird species between regions across different period of times and see if the patterns still holds and then being able maybe to do predictions in places and seeing if the be richness in those places where we have XYZ bird species still hold. So it will be like, looking in your area, but also for the data we have comparing different time, a different time periods, different look regions And I'm sure there's other ways I, yeah.
[00:21:32] Yeah. Can
[00:21:33] Andony Melathopoulos: you, can you explain that first one? I didn't quite get that. So the second part, I understand, you might find some, you already have bird data where you don't have the data and you go there and you just check are there, or, there's you just check? Is there a lot of bees or not a lot of base?
[00:21:47] Are they abundant or diverse, but the second one that you mentioned? No, I guess those, the first one that you mentioned. Looking at the seasonality and different regions,
[00:21:59] Josee Rouseau: maybe less, but in terms of years, for example, if we have, we establish a pattern for the years, 2000 to 2015, does that pattern hold 2015 to 2020?
[00:22:11] And so that's a way of validating is this about, and for some years still valid for the next set of years. And we can look at the. W the B and the birds 2015, and the ones in 2010, for example, and see is the same pattern coming up. I
[00:22:27] Andony Melathopoulos: see, because it may be because obviously burdened bee populations are constant fluctuating, and if they fluctuate at the same in synchrony, And it really is even more powerful.
[00:22:39] Josee Rouseau: So we limited our analysis to specific small block, of three, four or five years, because habit that may change the climate may change. And so really our, when we look at the bees and when we look at the birds, we did that within the very focus timeframe. And so if we want to be able to see if that.
[00:23:01] Link is still holds later on or earlier
[00:23:04] Andony Melathopoulos: on amazing work. We'll have you back as the results develop and as you start to do some of that validation work, but let's take another quick break. We're going to come back. We have a segment that we do with our guests where you tell us a little bit about your book and tool and favorite pollinator species.
[00:23:20] Okay. We are back with a longer break this time.
[00:23:27] Okay. So we've got three and you've already warned me. I said book recommendation. He said I think it's going to be an app. All we're going to now bend the rules here. What are your act app recommendations?
[00:23:38] Josee Rouseau: I have two app recommendations that I rely on. Every time I go outside, one of them is eBird.
[00:23:46] Of course. So either it is a citizen science and folks, anybody, my grandparents, myself, my son, they, everybody can actually upload what bird, the observed, where, and don't worry if. Don't know all your birds, you can do what you feel like doing and people at the other end we'll, accommodate and filter the data.
[00:24:05] But this is an app that's really useful to me. The other one, which actually even more people might like is Merlin. M E R L I N. Both of them are free apps. Merlin is what helps me identify the birds. So you can identify visually you can identify through photo. You can identify by some, and Merlin is helping me quite a bit with
[00:24:27] Andony Melathopoulos: that.
[00:24:28] Okay. I'm really curious about these apps because they seem to be. I, we, I think in the pollinator world, we have a lot to learn from the structure of them. So eBird, for example does it, is it just like I naturalist you, you capture a picture and you just load it up or is it more, are there more fields that you can fill in?
[00:24:47] Tell us a little bit about an entry in eBird.
[00:24:50] Josee Rouseau: Yes. An entry to the minimum and entry is going to be a specie. At a place and their abundance and at a time. And so your GPS knows where you are, your phone knows the dates. So that's being added somewhat automatically. And then you add the species and how many of them you detected.
[00:25:10] And then if you, one which we like is you can add all along, you were counting birds for how long you walked. Those are things you can have in there. There's definitely more. Field send an eye naturalist. You don't have to take a photo. Taking photos of birds is really hard. But you can actually add if the birds were singing, what behavior was it a male or female?
[00:25:31] There's a lot of sub details that you could, if you want to add. The good thing about eBird is that it keeps track of your observation. It's not only used by scientists at the other end, but for you yourself, you have an account and it keeps track of what you've seen, where and how many species you've seen in the county and the state and the country.
[00:25:52] So it keeps track of your of your walks yeah. Of your list.
[00:25:57] Andony Melathopoulos: I love my list. I'll have to tell ya for bees, but okay. But it has these fields for effort, which I guess is one of the things that almost every, you know, what automated way of recording a pollinator digitally. Really have a field force.
[00:26:13] So there, there is an option there where you can say I was out for about 30 minutes, roughly
[00:26:18] Josee Rouseau: actually. Yeah, you can, you don't even have to tell them that it was 30 minutes. You press, you start your walk in the forest, you press start and your firm's going to calculate all along. You've been adding births for and hope far you've been walking.
[00:26:31] And so often this is actually the. By the fault because you have the GPS in your phone and you start your list at the beginning, when you start count and then you stop.
[00:26:41] Andony Melathopoulos: That would be so great. Cause just descending into our world of the Oregon bee Atlas. You record all the plants that you saw, but you have no idea how long you were out there.
[00:26:52] It'd be really nice. If you had some way of saying I'm at the site I'm starting, and this is how much time I spent out here. But without having to record. It would
[00:27:01] Josee Rouseau: make a huge
[00:27:02] Andony Melathopoulos: difference. All right. Okay. Good. An idea. Was I, sorry, this is a good birthing hatched here today. Excellent. Okay. Insects don't exactly hatch.
[00:27:15] They dissolve through their Cory. Less dramatic
[00:27:24] Josee Rouseau: either
[00:27:25] Andony Melathopoulos: fledge. Now these are okay. All right. Merlin, as well as we'll put these in the show notes and so great way to identify your birds. And I like the idea of the bird song. I'm always here. That's
[00:27:39] Josee Rouseau: what makes identifying birds so much easier as they're so vocal there. So I don't want to say loud, but like each bird has their song and calls and.
[00:27:50] I'm working on it, but some people are so good at just walking somewhere and they know every little call what species it is
[00:27:57] Andony Melathopoulos: that they don't have Southern Tennell sutures.
[00:28:02] Josee Rouseau: You're a bear. They don't bring their microscope in the field.
[00:28:07] Andony Melathopoulos: All right. That's great. Those are really great app recommendations.
[00:28:11] And so I wonder what your go-to tool is for the kind of work that.
[00:28:16] Josee Rouseau: I work in front of a computer all day long. And the program I use is called R which you probably heard of. I do everything in
[00:28:25] Andony Melathopoulos: our recommended in the past. Yeah,
[00:28:29] Josee Rouseau: I format the data. I compare the data. I summarize the data. I do spatial analysis, that mystical analysis.
[00:28:38] I plot my results map my results everything's done in
[00:28:42] Andony Melathopoulos: our, and I guess that's people are wondering how can you have such a Swiss army knife of, in one software? And I guess it has it's it has this remarkable way that people write these packages.
[00:28:55] Josee Rouseau: It is an open source program.
[00:28:57] And people can write packages about a lot of different subjects. A lot of different tools have been written and those package they're a double check to make sure that they're doing what they're supposed to be doing. But for the most part there's, I dunno how many packages in our, but I would probably say many hundreds, if
[00:29:14] Andony Melathopoulos: not thousands, no, all the ecological ones, but I'm sure there's the business.
[00:29:19] Are sweet things. And there's the people who do financial like there must be weird, strange our packages and it opens the question for your, just to get really nerdy. What are the are packages that you find indispensable?
[00:29:32] Josee Rouseau: I have a soft spot for Matthew. And Matthew is when I have my data and I want to see where they are, but in a what's the word I can click on it.
[00:29:43] And it's going to pop up a little box of what that record is, and I can zoom in and zoom out, see different extent. I really like a map view,
[00:29:52] Andony Melathopoulos: but then I have others.
[00:29:56] Yeah,
[00:29:56] Josee Rouseau: It's really useful. And then I have others that just allows me to write functions and the way that's a very simple, so I have a range of packages.
[00:30:05] Andony Melathopoulos: For people who are in the Oregon bee Atlas, they get this report that has all these nice graphs and it shows where your specimens were collected and it compares your, what you identified versus other.
[00:30:17] And that's all done in our, so we have a programmer, Sam Robinson who pulls that altogether. It's a powerful program. A good tool. Yeah, it is indispensable
[00:30:27] Josee Rouseau: essential to my work anyway.
[00:30:28] Andony Melathopoulos: The last question we have is do you have a pollinator species that you consider your face?
[00:30:34] Josee Rouseau: To stick with the birds a little bit. I would say I love the Rufus hummingbird. It's one of my favorite pollinator. And in terms of the bees. I don't even know. I think they're all cool, but I would say BS as a generic thing. I love them. And then in terms of birds, the roughest hummingbirds is my favorite.
[00:30:54] Andony Melathopoulos: Since we've got, finally have a bird person on here, so we've got we have two resident hummingbirds in the winter and Oregon, is that right? At least in Western area, mainly
[00:31:02] Josee Rouseau: when the Anna's hummingbird, the Rufus is going to arrive around March, April and stay until about
[00:31:09] Andony Melathopoulos: And then I always wonder about this.
[00:31:11] I, I was out up in high elevation and it was drying up in the valley and I wondered do hummingbirds in the summer migrate upwards. Cause I imagine things get so dry. There's not a lot of flowering plants.
[00:31:26] Josee Rouseau: That is a very good observation. So at the hummingbird, the richest hummingbirds gonna migrate north in the spring March, April using a coastal route, which is not as high elevation, but is more likely to have a lot of flowers, for example.
[00:31:40] And then when they migrate south, they have a tendency of using higher elevation where it's a little bit more wet and that's where all the flowers are in July. As they're migrating south through, the Sierra and the Rockies. And so they do use slightly different habitats for each of their migration.
[00:31:59] And they, of course, they hear all S all summer until July, August, but
[00:32:04] Andony Melathopoulos: so let me get this straight. They migrate up the coast because, there's a night right now, there's flowers on the coast. And then they. They come in with the coastal range, but then they start to move inland.
[00:32:17] And then as the summer progresses, they start to move the higher elevation for to follow the flowers so
[00:32:23] Josee Rouseau: they can breed somewhat Yes, it's somewhat closer to the coast. Like they breed in Oregon up to Alaska. And then as they're migrating, getting ready to migrate south, they're going to go a little bit inland, and then they're going to start going south,
[00:32:37] Andony Melathopoulos: man.
[00:32:37] We need a hummingbird.
[00:32:41] Josee Rouseau: They're really cool, yeah.
[00:32:42] Andony Melathopoulos: Thank you for giving us the crossover showed today. This is a tempt, our appetite for making a full plan, a plunge into the birds in a future episode. And we are looking forward to having you back in the future to find out how your research is fairing.
[00:32:56] I'm
[00:32:56] Josee Rouseau: looking forward to share my results with you guys and this was pleasant. This is really nice. And thank you very much. Andoni.
The data we have on the natural history of birds, as well as their ranges, is far richer than for insect pollinators. This week we learned about an innovative approach to use bird data to inform what we know about insect pollinator populations.
Josée is a postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. She has been working with birds and bird data for the past 20 years and recently started a project assessing the role of birds as indicators of pollinator community richness. The goal is to leverage the large amount of bird data to help conserve bee populations.
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