Braving an early spring  blast of ice and snow, members of the Cohen Lab traveled to Burlington, VT this week to present their work at the Northeast Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies annual conference. On our first afternoon, post-doc Amanda Cheeseman co-moderated a symposium on current scientific knowns and unknowns in the ecology and conservation of the New England cottontail, which she organized with our collaborator Dr. Adrienne Kovach of the University of New Hampshire.   The New England cottontail is a critically imperiled rabbit native to the northeastern U.S. that faces numerous threats discussed by the symposium speakers.   Dr. Kovach began by summarizing our current knowledge on the species population structure, and Amanda presented her Ph.D. work on habitat selection and competition with non-native eastern cottontails.   Samantha Mello spoke about her Master's work on parasites of the two species, and other talks focused on captive breeding and release efforts, rangewide disease and parasite studies, population viability and response to management, and the multi-state collaborative monitoring effort for the species.    The symposium represented the first time that researchers from all the Universities studying the New England cottontail organized a scientific meeting to synthesize their work, including SUNY-ESF, the University of New Hampshire, the University of Rhode Island, Brown University, and the University of Connecticut.    In a concurrent session that afternoon, Dr. Cohen presented the work of Ph.D. student Michelle Stantial on the application of miniaturized GPS tags for tracking piping plovers during the breeding season.   Michelle has demonstrated that high-resolution habitat use information for this threatened species can safely be obtained using these 1-gram transmitters.   

The Cohen lab's bird projects took the stage for the second day of the conference, beginning with Justin Droke's presentation of his Master's work on spring staging interaction between American black ducks and mallards, followed by Adam Bleau's parallel work on competition between these two species in the winter.   Black ducks, native to the northeastern U.S., saw sharp population declines in the 20th century, and the closely-related mallard expanded rapidly into their range.  There have been several hypotheses to explain the black duck decline, and Justin and Adam's work focuses on the role of competition with mallards in the nonbreeding part of the annual cycle.    Alison Kocek gave our final talk of the conference, unveiling her results on the use of PIT tags attached to legbands to greatly reduce capture and handling of birds in tidal marshes, while at the same time greatly increasing the rate of identification of individual nesting birds compared to repeat captures.  Her work focuses on 

The Cohen Lab is proud to announce that Adam Bleau has completed his thesis defense.   Adam investigated the ecological interactions between American black ducks and mallards wintering in the Finger Lakes region of New York.   The black duck is native to the eastern U.S. and declined drastically in the later 20th century.  The more common mallard invaded the geographic range of the black duck, aided by land use changes and release of captive-bred birds to augment the population for hunting.   Understanding the reason for the black duck decline, and the role of competition with mallards, has long been of interest to wildlife managers.   Adam perform occupancy and behavioral surveys and tracked ducks with satellite tags for two winters to compare home range and habitat use between the two species.   His work highlighted the differential response of black ducks and mallards to human development as well as the potential importance of remnant emergent marshes in the region.   Adam did an impressive job navigating complicated field and analytical issues, and putting everything together for his thesis.  Congratulations, Adam!