Tracking the ‘featherprints’
Cloud of starlings invades a vineyard in West Kelowna.
Research continues to determine the origin of starling flocks plaguing Okanagan farmland. By Judie Steeves
R
aucous and aggressive, flocks of invasive starlings can noisily devour crops in hours, pecking at fruit so it can’t be sold and leaving behind a wasteland—a season’s effort destroyed in no time. And, this fall, observers say there were even larger flocks than normal descending on farms in the Okanagan.
They’re not native to North America, but are an introduced bird that preys on native songbirds, their eggs and young, as well as on grain and fruit crops.
Starlings are listed on the World Conservation Union list of the world’s 100 worst invasive species. While they do breed in the Okanagan, Kootenay, Similkameen and Fraser Valleys, populations there increase in winter, despite the fact that no nesting is taking place, so they are migrating to those areas from elsewhere.
So, where do they come from? It’s a question that science is attempting to answer, in the person of ornithologist Tom Dickinson from
Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, and master’s student Jessi Neuhauser of UBC-Okanagan in Kelowna, who has embarked on the starling investigation for her thesis. She’s using a new way to track the birds: identifying isotopes locked in cells in their feathers which can identify landscape markers from the area of their birth.
“The young bird picks up different chemicals from the landscape and uses them to build its feathers,” explains Neuhauser.
Some of those chemicals, or the combination of different ones, is unique to particular areas, making it possible to use that information to identify where the adult birds have migrated from.
She has been gathering these samples from around the province, along with some from Washington
State to amass a library of these “signatures’ from which to check adult birds’ feather signatures against.
The intent is to use the library to pinpoint where the starlings grew up, in order to know where to begin to try and control populations of the birds.
Using a new instrument called an inductively-coupled plasma mass spectrometer at UBC-O to break the feather components into ions, Neuhauser can store that information for later identification of adult bird samples that are gathered, usually where the birds have become a problem.
She rues the fact this is a master’s thesis project rather than a doctoral one, so she doesn’t have the time to do as broad a sampling as she’d like. However, this winter she will set
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JUDIE STEEVES
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