Weather did very little to stop Arik Kershenbaum and his research team from finding Prairie Warblers this week.
Thunderstorms at Seven Islands Wild Life Refuge Center in Kodak, Tenn. postponed Thursday morning’s bird-calling research to Friday morning at the Forks of the River Wild Life Management Area in South Knoxville.
A group of undergraduate students at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis attended the workshop and helped assemble advanced recording equipment in order to track bird calls.
On the closing weekday, Kershenbaum and his research group recorded a Prairie Warbler, a tail-wagging yellow warbler with black streaks down its sides which is normally found in scrubby fields and forests throughout the Eastern and South-Central United States. Despite its name, this species of birds can be found, not found on prairies, but in Florida. They fly north to Tennessee during the summer breeding season.
“It’s sort of an ascending buzzing call,” Kelly Sturner, an education and outreach coordinator for NIMBioS, said. “That’sprobably the best way to describe it.”
NIMBioS formed from a new collaboration between the National Science Foundation and the other agency sponsors, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Nineteen undergraduates are participating in the 2013 NIMBioS Research Experiences for Undergraduates, REU, for eight weeks. During the program, participants have been living on campus and working in teams with NIMBioS postdocs and UT faculty to conduct research at the interface of mathematics and biology. The award includes a stipend, housing and some funding to support travel.
NIMBioS’s REU program is in its fifth year.
Kershenbaum, an expert on analyzing animal vocal communica- tions, was accompanied by Sturner, wildlife scientist David Buehler, UT graduate student Mathey Menachery and Marist College student Nicole Bender, Southeastern Louisiana University student Sunil Shahi and Harvey Mudd College student Christian Mason, who was thrilled to be accepted on to the program.
“It’s something I think everyone has to experience,” Mason, a mathematical and computational biology major, said. “We’re hoping to at least get a working version of everything we’re doing pretty soon. Kind of train the system which we’d be able to check different bird calls and then from then on figure out how to present it.”
The project will also, according to Kershenbaum, “develop their automatic techniques.”
In more than an hour, the seven-man team collected bird calls using a Zoom H2 recorder wired to a plastic-coned funnel. With several of these devices in hand, researchers were able to collect bird songs from a Carolina Wren, Field Sparrows, a cardinal, blue jay and a raven.
With these devices left in different areas, NIMBioS will be able to monitor rare bird populations and single out each bird call through static and other back- ground noises
“Given with all the other birds singing on top it’s actually pretty good data for us to pretty much train our algorithm,”Mason said. “So eventually we want to get good calls and bad calls, ones that are really close up and loud ones that are pretty far away and covered up by other noise.” Kershenbaum also wanted the researchers to develop the ability to monitor different areas in spite of any background noise, a concept similar to his experience with whales but different from his work with hyraxes.
“Working with hyraxes it’s really working on communication structure,” Kershenbaum said. “Why are they doing it (and) what they’re saying. Whereas with whales and bird songs, a lot of the whale work is a lot about population monitoring (and) can we detect particular species in a noisy background and that’s the consolation.”
Another consolation: REU students like Mason have been enjoying the experience.
“Yeah definitely,” the Harvey Mudd College student said when asked if he’d recommend it to other students. “I mean obviously I think you need to be either (a) math or biology (major). Actually what we’re doing now is signal processing which is kind of this whole different area that I don’t think the three of us have ever had experience with and yet I’m having a lot of fun with it actually. We’ve never really experienced it before, but yeah I would recommend it.”
The 2013 NIMBioS under- graduates finish their research experience on August 2.
