Project News – Page 2 – The Fairywren Project

Jul

2020

January-April 2020 Data Update

Greetings, friends!

We hope this message finds you well during trying times. It’s been ages since we’ve last sent out an update but we’re very encouraged to see you’ve been busy! Thank you! Allison and I have been busy applying for funding to expand the Fairywren Project and turn it into our full-time research while also completing some other projects.

I (Joe) have been finishing up my PhD research on the social and ecological drivers of moult into nuptial plumage in Red-backed Fairywrens and I plan to defend my PhD sometime this spring (southern hemisphere)/fall (northern hemisphere). My collaborators and I are finding some really interesting results for the Red-backed Fairywrens. It turns out that how social Red-backed Fairywren groups are during the winter depends on weather conditions. In wet periods, the birds are less social and more territorial, while in dry periods they sometimes form large flocks, potentially to work together to find food. During my work we sometimes saw flocks in dry periods that contained 35 Red-backed Fairywrens at once! Talk about a lot of tiny birds to keep track of.

These findings are really exciting because they’re a tiny window into what we’re hoping to find with the data you’re submitting to us through eBird. Will all Red-backed Fairywren populations behave the same way my study population near Brisbane did? Will all fairywren species respond to rainfall in the same way? We don’t know! Preliminary evidence indicates that different species do respond to their environment in different ways, but we have lots more work to do.

Allison has been publishing more of her work from her study population of Purple-backed and Splendid Fairywrens outside of Adelaide. Some new work from her and her colleagues will be important in furthering our understanding of why fairywrens are social in the first place. The cooperative breeding we see in fairywrens is really quite odd in the animal world. For fairywrens it’s common that a young male will remain with his parents in his first breeding season and help his parents raise his siblings, but in some species like Purple-backed Fairywrens even young females will even join a group and help raise the group’s offspring!

Once we complete these previous commitments, we’ll be really diving into the data you’ve been sending us for the last year and a half now. In every grant application we’re submitting we have been including your participation numbers as evidence of the power of citizen science and the team we can make together. So thank you for your help!

And you have been busy, here are our numbers from August 2018-April 2020. So good to see more checklists coming in from all over Australia!

Let us know if you have any interesting observations or good pictures! We always enjoy seeing them.

Joe and Allison

Oct

2019

Purple-crowned Fairywren Team is looking for field assistants

See the message below from the Purple-crowned Fairywren team. You could work with this amazing species that few birders get to see!

Photo by Niki Teunissen

Purple-crowned Fairy-wren Volunteer Field Assistants Jan to April/June 2020

We are looking for a volunteer field assistant to assist with data collection for research on heat stress and helping behaviour in purple-crowned fairy-wrens. Our study population is located in the Kimberley, Western Australia. Fieldwork will take place during and shortly after the wet season, when most of the birds are breeding.

We are seeking a volunteer field assistant to help monitor all fairy-wren territories along a 15 km stretch of river. Work will involve re-sighting colour-banded birds, nest searching, monitoring all breeding attempts, placement and upkeep of nest cameras, assessing nest camera footage, assisting in field experiments, mist netting and data entry.

The field site is located at a remote sanctuary an 8-hour drive from Broome, WA. Volunteers will be camping in tents but have access to electricity, a landline phone, (restricted) internet, hot showers, and a spacious fully equipped kitchen, which is shared with the rest of the (usually small) community at the field station. The field site is located in a beautiful area, with many opportunities to see native wildlife and some of the most iconic bird species of Australia, and many waterholes and gorges which volunteers may get the opportunity to explore.

Volunteer field assistants must be flexible and willing to work long days in hot and humid conditions, while often crossing the river and sometimes carrying heavy equipment or encountering the occasional snake. Furthermore, field assistants must have full colour-vision, be physically fit, be comfortable with living in a remote location, have good interpersonal skills, and be able to work independently in the field. It is important for volunteers to be accurate when collecting and entering data, and to ask for help when unsure about anything. Previous experience in similar conditions and with nest searching and colour-band re-sighting is required; experience with behavioural observations and mist netting is a bonus.

Fieldwork will commence in January (dates are somewhat flexible depending on transport opportunities) and run until mid-late June 2020, however the end date is flexible, with field assistants having the choice to only stay for the wet season (until mid-late April) or to stay for part of the dry season too (until mid-late June). The cost of accommodation (mostly camping in tents), local travel expenses, and food will be covered; (international) flights to and from Broome will be partially covered, or for exceptional candidates may be fully covered.

For further information and to apply, please send a CV, cover letter and contacts for at least two references that are familiar with your nest searching, colour-band re-sighting, and mist netting experience to Niki Teunissen: niki.teunissen@monash.edu. Applications will be accepted until 1 November.

Find out more about Dr. Anne Peters' lab here: https://sites.google.com/site/petersresearchgroup/home

Oct

2019

May-August Data Update

Dear friends of the Fairywren Project,

Big news! The Fairywren Project is one year old! Technically we are a little over a year old, but now we have a full year of data extending from August 2018 through August 2019. And you’ve been busy during that time!

We are extremely impressed with these numbers, almost 500 participants and over 4,500 checklists is very encouraging. Here’s the breakdown of how many checklists we have per species:

It should be no surprise to anyone that Superb Fairywrens are far in the lead, as their distribution best overlaps with the most populated areas in Australia. Splendid Fairywrens finally got a boost but our numbers on the other Western Australia Fairywrens (Red-winged and Blue-breasted) are still low. Make sure your WA birder friends know about the Fairywren Project! And as always White-winged Fairywrens are very appreciated too, but they have the benefit of occurring in every state/territory of Australia, so their numbers are a little bit higher. Here is the map of where your sightings are coming from:

It’s wonderful to see some of the interior filling in now! Those arid Purple-backed and White-winged Fairywren checklists are appreciated from you traveling birders! Thank you again to everyone who has participated. We’re really excited to see where this project can go over the next few years and we're especially excited to see how fairywrens continue to respond to changing environmental conditions. As always, we will continue to update you on our findings. We’re currently working in the background to transcribe all of your observations and start to analyze the data. We’re also long over-due for a “Fairywrens in the News” post. There has been some fascinating fairywren research published lately that we’re excited to share with you. We’ll do that soon.

A reminder for your checklists: if you’re trying to submit data to us, don’t forget to include plumage types for the brown birds you see as well as the bright males! Letting us know that at least one of the males you saw was in bright plumage gives us a little bit of information, but we can do much more with data that includes plumage types for all the fairywrens you’re able to get good looks at. Additionally, make sure to use our plumage codes or clearly specify the plumage type when you submit data. For example, 3b, or three bright, or three males in nuptial plumage, is great, but if you just say “three males” then we’re not sure if you mean bright males, intermediate males, or dull males. If you’ve been reporting males as only “males” with no plumage information and you want to get that corrected, reach out to us (fairywrenproject@gmail.com) and we can help do that!

Thank you again! Let us know if you have any questions or fun observations and keep tracking those fairywrens!

Joe and Allison

Sep

2019

Conferences and Transect Updates

Dear Friends of the Fairywren Project,

Updates are here! Since we talked last we've presented at a couple conferences and we've completed another transect! First, conferences:

Part 1: In June we were fortunate to attend one of the largest bird conferences in the world, the annual meeting of the American Ornithological Society in Anchorage, Alaska. Despite being named the "American" Ornithological Society, researchers come from all over the world to present their findings and ideas, including a few researchers from Australia! The diversity of birds presented on at this conference is astounding. We learned about everything from how bird migration can be tracked via weather radar, to the tricky evolutionary relationships among Australian Woodswallows.

But most exciting to us, was the opportunity to present a poster on our ideas for the Fairywren Project. Conference presentations usually come in two forms - you can give a 12 minute talk and then answer questions for 3 minutes, or you can present a poster and strike up conversations with people who wander past and want to learn more about your research in the two hours that poster sessions usually run. Posters are great for new ideas and preliminary data because they give you time to interact with your audience and allow time for informative discussions that can end up shaping the direction of your research.

Australia's fairywrens are nearly as popular in the American birding crowd as they are among Australian birders, so we were approached by many an inquiring researcher looking to learn more about cooperative breeding and fancy plumage in fairywrens. We did not have time before the conference to analyze any of the data you've submitted yet, but come next year we will be sure to present on your findings! So keep in mind, that even though while you're birding it might not seem like you're doing too much by reporting plumage types and group sizes, next year the data you are submitting now will be seen by ornithologists from across the world!

Check out our poster below and let us know if you have any questions! Many of the ideas presented in the poster you've probably seen before if you've been following us for awhile, but some may be new. You should be able to click on the poster to make it bigger, if your email program supports it. If not, email us at fairywrenproject@gmail.com and we can send you a larger version.

Part 2: We did another transect! Allison is back in South Australia for another field season with Purple-backed and Splendid Fairywrens, but right before her season started, we spent a week repeating the same transect path we did last December. Like last time, we started in wet Victoria and drove up to dry Broken Hill. This time by starting right before most fairywrens began breeding we were hoping to capture variation in timing of moult into bright plumage across different environments. And we did! We saw Superb, Purple-backed, White-winged, and Splendid Fairywrens, just under 400 individual birds in total. In groups with multiple males, it was not uncommon for the dominant male to be fully in nuptial plumage or close to it, but the subordinates were often behind the dominant in moulting in their nuptial plumage. Below are some of our favorite photos from the transect. We'll look at these data and get you some preliminary findings in the near future!

As always, thank you for your continued interest in the Fairywren Project. August marked a full year from when we first launched the project. In only a few days eBird will update their database and we will be able to see how many submissions we have in our first year. Exciting! So many questions to ask and we're so excited to start playing with these data.

One of the funniest moult patterns we've seen on a male Purple-backed Fairywren. He looks like a superhero with the blue on either side of his face and brown on the top of his head!

The grumpiest male Superb Fairywren in moult.

A male Superb Fairywren in very early moult! Look closely at his cheek and you'll see a blue feather coming in. This was a fun find, notice how the bird has both brown female-like lores around his eyes and a male-like dark bill. Juvenile males have lores when they hatch, then moult out of them into bright plumage before their first breeding season as an adult.

Here's a female Superb Fairywren for reference. Notice the brown bill.

Female Purple-backed Fairywren.

The elusive White-winged Fairywrens. Female and male pair.

Finally, despite all the close up photographs, this is what we normally see when we're out birding. "Wait! Come back!"

Happy Birding!

Joe and Allison

Jul

2019

January-April Data Update

Hi Fairywren Followers,

Long time no talk! We last updated you in April on the results from our transect trip last December, but in the meantime Allison and I have presented our research at an ornithology conference held in Alaska, written an email and article for eBird, and processed your submission data. Look for another post detailing our conference presentation in the next week or two, but in the meantime here are some updates:

1. eBird article: We recently wrote an article for the eBird Australia homepage which you can check out here. It mostly contains information that you’ve seen before, but it does have some new nuggets of information, including new submission numbers (see below) and a discussion on the differences between Lovely Fairywren and Superb Fairywren moult schedules. Why most male Superb Fairywrens moult into dull plumage during the winter but all male Lovely Fairywrens stay in bright plumage year-round is a fascinating question.

Our best guess is that maybe rainfall amount and predictability are behind this difference. Lovely Fairywrens live in the tropical North-east of Queensland where it’s very wet, while Superb Fairywrens live along the South-east coast where rainfall is less predictable. Your data on the moult schedules of the fairywrens near you will help us learn if there’s variation among populations. If rainfall is behind it all, then maybe Superb Fairywrens in wetter habitats will be more likely to remain in bright plumage year-round than Superb Fairywrens in dry habitats. What do you think?

2. New submission numbers! Between August 2018 and April 2019, 364 participants have submitted 2,886 checklists with plumage and/or group data. We’re really happy to see these results. To think that over 350 people have participated in less than a year is incredible. Thank you for your participation!

3. We have our first five months of data (August – December) annotated! It takes a bit of work to go from the eBird comments section to actually having the data in a format we can work with. For that we have an excellent lab technician, Rachael Lehman, working with us to process the data and get it into working order. We’ll make time soon to start and play with the data and share any preliminary findings with you all. The real results will come when we can look at a whole year of data or even multiple years of data to compare how variation in rainfall across years influences group sizes and plumage.

More soon! Let us know if you have any questions or see any cool fairywrens!

Joe and Allison

Apr

2019

Transect Data Update

Dear Fairywren Followers,

It has been 130 days since we returned from our whirlwind tour of south-eastern Australia collecting fairywren data (who’s counting?), and we finally have some data to share!

To recap, in December Joe, Ian Hoppe and I set off to add to the body of data you are helping us collect on fairywren plumage and social group size. We covered about 2500 kms starting in Bendigo National Park, VIC and ending in Broken Hill, NSW before we had to dash back to Adelaide to catch flights home to the US. We focused our efforts on observing Purple-backed and White-winged fairywrens across this latitudinal and rainfall gradient, but of course couldn’t help but see many a Superb along the way as well. In total we saw 419 individual fairywrens, and got some wonderful insights into how the environment might be impacting the biology of these species.

So what did we find?

Well...White-winged fairywrens did not exhibit much variation in the number of bright males we saw or in the sizes of their social groups at all. In hindsight, we aren’t terribly surprised by this. While the populations we observed covered a substantial rainfall gradient, the microhabitat we found them in was always quite open and arid, such as the salt flat below. So it may take even more variation in environment than we covered to impact these arid specialists!

White-winged Fairywren (dull unknown) by Allison Johnson

Allison and Joe walking through a salt flat. Image by Ian Hoppe.

Purple-backed fairywrens, on the other hand, seem to vary quite dramatically with rainfall! While our data is preliminary and represents only a quick snapshot of the populations, we think some patterns might be emerging. It seems like there may be fewer bright males at sites experiencing lower winter rainfall (sites further to the north along the transect) and that there may be more males than females in these same populations.

Our most striking result however, is for group size. We observed a strong relationship between the average group size of each site we stopped at and the winter rainfall that site experienced in 2018 — sites with low winter rainfall had the largest social groups! This is exactly what we were predicting, previous research has shown that purple-backed fairywrens who have helpers at their nest produce more offspring, so it was exciting to find larger group sizes in harsher environments.

Why might this pattern emerge? It may be beneficial to the helpers to stay in their natal territories or join someone else’s territory when their prospects for rearing young on their own are low or when their survival might be negatively impacted by dispersal (such as in an arid environment), similarly, breeders may benefit from having helpers at their nest to provision young when the habitat quality is low and insects are hard to find, lightening the parental care load they must carry themselves.

Bright male Purple-backed Fairywrens. Image by Allison Johnson.

We hope you find these results as exciting as we do! We can’t wait to start comparing your data coming in from eBird to our transect results and to start examining variation across species. As we’ve already seen from the transect, what happens in one species might not happen in another!

We are already planning our next transect trips for 2019 — this time we hope to compare group sizes and plumage types between the winter and breeding seasons. As the seasons are changing, keep the fairywrens in mind! Let us know what you are seeing! As always, let us know if you have any ideas or question. Get in touch via Facebook or email (fairywrenproject@gmail.com).

Happy birding!

Allison and Joe

Mar

2019

Fairywrens in the News

Project news: The Fairywren Project was recently featured on the ABC RN Science Show with Robyn Williams! Click the link below to listen to Joe talk to Robyn about his fairywren research, the Fairywren Project, and how he got started studying birds:

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/fairywren-project-collates-bird-sightings-to-monitor-changes-in/10928848

Fairywrens in the news:
Every once in awhile we like to compile all of the Fairywren research that's been published in the last few months. See the stories below for the latest fairywren findings. If you would like to read the full scientific paper but don't have access, let us know and we can send you the pdf.

1. A collaboration across fairywren researchers used 3D-printed models to measure the predation cost of conspicuous female plumage. Cain et al. found that dull female fairywren models were attacked at the same rate as conspicuous female models (brown Superb Fairywren female versus blue Lovely Fairywren female). This finding indicates females may not pay a predation cost for having fancy plumage. Read more: Cain et al. 2019. American Naturalist.

2. Purple-crowned Fairywrens had very low rates of malaria infection over a 12-year study despite mosquitos being prevalent and other nearby species having higher rates. Between 20% and 80% of Red-backed Fairywrens studied were infected with malaria, while only ~5% of Purple-crowned Fairywrens were infected. Read more: Eastwood et al. 2019. International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife.

3. Extra-pair paternity (males and females mating outside of their social bond) in Red-winged Fairywrens may be beneficial to incestuous pairs (mothers paired with sons). When a mother produced offspring with her son, those offspring produced 75% fewer offspring themselves when compared to offspring that came from non-incestuous relationships. Lichtenauer et al. 2019. Evolution.

4. Short-term variation in temperature and rainfall explain differences in immune function in Purple-crowned Fairywrens, while habitat quality and social group structure had no measurable effect on immune function. Read more: Roast et al. 2019. Physiological and Biochemical Zoology.

5. Infrared cameras can be used to survey night-roosting birds, including fairywrens! Read more: Mitchell and Clarke 2019. Journal of Field Ornithology.

6. Plumage colour signals competitive ability in aggressive contexts in male and female Lovely Fairywrens. Read more: Leitão et al. 2019. Animal Behaviour.

7. Nestling telomere length predicts lifespan in Purple-crowned Fairywrens that live past their first year.
Read more: Eastwood et al. 2019. Molecular Ecology.

8. The nestlings of Horsfield's Bronze Cuckoos that parasitize Superb Fairywrens nests were found to suffer no obvious costs when facing a large eviction load. Researchers hypothesized that cuckoo nestlings that had more eggs to evict (push out of) the nest would have lower mass, but instead those nestlings had higher mass than individuals that had fewer host eggs to evict. Read more: Medina et al. 2019. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology

9. Environmental noise from anthropogenic sources reduced Superb Fairywren response to alarm calls when the noise was high amplitude and overlapped alarm calls. Read more: Zhou et al. 2019. Functional Ecology.

Questions about any of this research? Let us know and we'll do our best to help explain it, but if we can't do that we'll put you in touch with the researchers themselves. Do you have ideas for research? Let us know by emailing us at fairywrenproject@gmail.com.

Top photo by Joseph Welklin.

Feb

2019

August-December Data Update

Our August-December data update has arrived! We've pooled all of your sightings during this period and are extremely pleased to report that our numbers have grown way more than we ever expected they could. We're up to 256 participants and 1798 checklists with plumage and/or group data! Thank you all very much for your effort and contributions to the project, every single sighting helps!

You can find the social media slides we've made for this update below. Now that we have the data in hand we're starting to analyze it and will look to have some results to you in a month or two. In the meantime, expect sooner than that an update on some of our findings from the transect we did at the beginning of December. We're working on those analyses currently.

This is the time of year when most fairywren males are moulting out of bright plumage as breeding is coming to a close. Although in Superb Fairywrens and Red-backed Fairywrens, old males can sometimes maintain bright plumage year-round. There's reason to believe this is probably true for the other species as well. As you're out birding, gardening, or walking the dog, keep us in mind! All fairywren sightings are important to us, but we're especially curious this time of year how common it is for males to moult from bright plumage to bright plumage, how many species this occurs in, and how it differs across environments.

Thank you for your participation and interest! Looking forward to sharing some results with you soon.

-Joe and Allison

Jan

2019

A year in the life of a Superb Fairywren family

We consider ourselves very lucky to study fairywrens, not only because these small birds are so charismatic and fun to watch, but also because everyone we run into across the country, wether it be a tow-truck driver in Broken Hill, or the trivia host at our local pub, has a fairywren story.

So we were delighted when Leigh Roswen shared this incredible post from her blog with us that chronicles nearly a whole year of Superb Fairywren action in her garden, from males molting into bright plumage, to observing nesting, to finally seeing the fledglings and watching them grow up. Do take the time to check it out for yourself! It is wonderfully written.

Do you have a fairywren story? Share it with us!

Read Leigh’s story here: https://leighroswen.com/2019/01/11/the-superb-family/

Photo by Leigh Roswen

Dec

2018

Preliminary Transect Results

We completed our transect! In 8 days of birding, we traveled from Brookfield Conservation Park, east to Bendigo, then north to Broken Hill, saw 419 individual fairywrens, drove 2500kms, and saw many bird species new to us. Allison and I were joined by our good friend, Ian Hoppe, an expert birder and experienced field technician. This is a preliminary update on some of the discoveries and observations we made during the transect. We’ll follow up with a more in-depth update sometime after the Holiday season.

Finding #1: Superb Fairywrens are everywhere! Before our transect, we thought of Superbs as a species common around human-influenced habitat, including gardens and roadsides, but also common to natural habitat boundaries, like forest-grassland edges, or anywhere where shrubby bushes like lantana are common. But now after the transect, we realize just how adaptable this species really is, and how many habitats they can live in.

Our finding began while searching for Purple-backed Fairywrens in Bendigo National Park just north of Bendigo, NSW. We were in a fairly tall eucalypt forest with a low shrub understory that looked like perfect habitat for Purple-backeds. Naturally, when we first heard fairywren calls, we all looked at each other with excitement, spread out to increase our chances of seeing the birds, and ran over to where the calls were coming from. Allison stopped first and said “I see a bright male Superb…”, I thought she was mistaken at first so I pressed forward, but then Ian confirmed, and I saw for myself. Sure enough, two bright male Superbs popped up out of the understory and flew off, followed by a female!

Superb Fairywren Habitat from Bendigo National Park

This scenario repeated itself over and over again, showing that, unbeknownst to us, Superb Fairywrens can indeed live in the forest. But it only got weirder from there. Next, we found Superb Fairywrens overlapping with White-winged Fairywrens in a salt-lake habitat dominated by short saltwort bushes. While published research has shown these species can overlap, seeing a dry-dwelling, inland species like the White-wings overlap with a wet-dwelling, coastal species like Superbs in person was still surprising.

Salt lake habitat where we found Superbs and White-wings overlapping. Compare how different this habitat is to the Bendigo National Park photos above. Superbs are so adaptable!

The ultimate kicker was when we made it up to Broken Hill, our site furthest north, and deepest into the outback. Allison discovered a pair of Superb Fairywrens (one bright male and a female) living in the garden of a local school while on walk. Granted, the habitat in that garden did not look too different from gardens along the east coast, as there were large bushes and shrubs and the vegetation was fairly green, but if you’ve ever looked at a map of NSW, you’ll know that Broken Hill is surrounded by nothing but outback dirt and sheep stations for at least 200kms on all sides. Before Allison’s sighting, Superb Fairywrens had never been seen as far inland as Broken Hill (according to eBird). Given the unlikeliness of the population actually ranging that far naturally (most sightings cut off around Mildura, VIC when heading north into NSW), we’re wondering if this is a small introduced population. We spent a little bit of time looking for the birds again the next day, but could not relocate them. So if you’re ever passing through Broken Hill and see Superb Fairywrens we’d love to know!

Finding #2: Purple-backed and White-winged fairywren habitat is extremely fragmented at the southern end of their ranges in Victoria, especially for the White-wings. This finding made us wonder how these birds adapt to their surroundings and whether birds are able to move between populations at all.

Finding #3: Any Aussie could probably have told us this before we left, but it was fun to see for ourselves: the habitat between Bendigo and Broken Hill is so different and can change so quickly! It was really fun to watch as the plant and animal communities changed as we travelled along the rainfall gradient from wet to dry.

Look for a more detailed update with some data come January/February. Until then, happy holidays! Keep us in mind when you’re out birding! Sightings at all times of year are important to our project. And as always, let us know if you have any ideas about the questions we raised here, or if you have any observations that match with ours or are different from ours! Get in touch via facebook (Fairywren Project) or email: fairywrenproject@gmail.com.

Joe, Allison, and Ian