This year’s crew was led by Hobson Lab postdoc Annemarie van der Marel who was joined by awesome field assistants Chelsea Carminito, Claire O’Connell, and Alexa P. Our goal was to collect new social interaction data from parakeet groups. The plan was to conduct several “social perturbations”, each time removing an individual from the group and seeing how the group responded.
This field season was especially exciting for me as we’d be returning to work at the same site with some of the very same birds I worked with during my PhD work (12 long years ago!). I have been waiting to do this removal experiment ever since! It was great to get back into the field and work with the parakeets again.
Like many projects, our plans for our spring field season of parakeet research was disrupted by COVID-19. Originally we were planning to collect 2.5 months of data – this got shortened to about 2 weeks of data before we had to evacuate the crew and cancel the field season. Luckily, everyone got home safely and is in a good area to weather the pandemic. We also did get some data which we will use as pilot data to motivate next year’s data collection (fingers crossed we can get back into the field!).
