For her second field season studying piping plover movements and flight patterns in Massachusetts and New Jersey, M.S. student Michelle Stantial was able to build an automated telemetry system for monitoring radio-tagged plovers at her study sites. Michelle was awarded grants from the Goldenrod Foundation and the Garden Club of America to fund the telemetry station.

She says of the system, "It helps us detect movements of piping plovers during times of poor weather and low-light conditions (times when birds are more susceptible to collisions with turbines).  We leave it out on the beach and let it 'listen' to a bird with a telemetry unit for a few nights in a row, then we switch to another individual."

Michelle's research will examine the implications of wind turbines piping plovers, specifically examining the potential for collision mortality if turbines are built in or near their habitat.

M.S. Student Laurel has been hard at work since January monitoring Ring-Necked Pheasants in Western New York using camera traps, call surveys, and flush counts. She's working with the NY Department of Environmental Conservation to evaluate different monitoring methods for this population. Laurel sent an update on how her season has progressed as she begins to wrap up her work:

"Based on our work in the winter, we will be recommending that continued monitoring efforts include camera trapping in the winter to obtain an estimate of sex ratio, in order to determine total population size based on an index that only reflects the number of rooster pheasants present in the landscape. The utility of capture-mark-recapture as a winter monitoring strategy is greatly limited by the time and effort required to trap individual pheasants.
We have almost reached the end of the rooster call surveys and triangulation-based distance sampling for this season.  I will be presenting our results at the 20th Annual Conference of The Wildlife Society later this year."

Amanda Cheeseman will be joining our lab this upcoming fall as a PhD student on the New England Cottontail Project.  She will be examining factors limiting imperiled New England Cottontail populations in New York State. This project is a collaboration between the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and several ESF faculty members.

Amanda graduated in 2010 with a B.S. in Zoology from Michigan State University. From there, she went onto study dietary changes of eastern spotted skunks and striped skunks, over the last century, in response to landscape structure. She received her M.S. from Fort Hays State University in Kansas in May of this year.