Burke Museum 4/25/12

For our class period we met at the Burke Museum today. Once everyone had arrived, we split into our project groups and rotated between three stations led by Susan, Josh, and an employee of the Burke Museum. The topics for each station were sex, treachery, and death. We entered the back area of the museum which I had never been to and has a large collection of thousands of birds. I began with the employee at the Burke and we examined sexual dimorphism between different types of birds. We learned about size dimorphisms and color dimorphisms. Arctic shorebirds select for a smaller body size in males in order to do mating maneuvers to court female mates. At the next station we learned about treachery with Josh and how certain birds disguise eggs and drop them in other bird’s nests. This is common behavior in cowbirds. Cowbirds wait for a bird to leave and drop their eggs in different nests. Their eggs are thicker and harder to break than warbler eggs and if the warbler try and break them, they can roll and destroy the warbler’s own eggs. Also, there is a theory called the mafia theory when cowbirds discover that there eggs have been destroyed, they come back to the warbler’s nest and kill their young. After learning about how big of jerks cowbirds are, we rotated to Susan’s station to learn about death and population dynamics. We took a look at demographics for different countries such as India and Japan and compared what their expected growth rates might be. We then looked at differences between juvenile and adult birds and mortality rates.

Posted on May 30, 2012 11:37 PM by twitwer