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Recently we finished the 2022 Fall season of the Seattle Audubon Bird Collision Monitoring second year! We were at UW again, but this time we ended up adding 3 new buildings to the route and I was paired with Dr. Elaine Chuang, who I met first when I went to see the Queen Anne Snow Owl in 2020 and again for the same collision monitoring group. I also interviewed her for my Asian American Studies class.
Most of the season was somewhat uneventful, but it was definitely fun getting to talk with her about various going-ons about birds and Seattle and such. I learned a lot from her.
The last day was definitely the most interesting, though. First, Josh Morris - the head of the study - had planted some bird specimens around some of our survey sites both to test if we could find them and to see how long they lasted, either from scavenging, human interference, decomposition, or some other external factor.
The right photos is one of the birds we found, she picked it up and showed me the interesting features of it.
Also, completely unrelated to collisions and the planted birds, we found this desiccated pigeon corpse right outside one of buildings we were surveying. Judging by the fact that it was pretty far from any windows, it was right under a tree, had most of the meat taken out, and a Cooper's hawk was known to hunt in the area, we assumed that a Coop got to it first.
Here's a photo of us looking at it (Elaine actually moved it around with her bare hands too, which was definitely something)
Plus some photos of some various surveying activities
And the following are from the post-season bird outing to Union Bay! It was really, really smoky but I still got some good photos so I'm adding them too
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