Redwood Region Audubon Society Presents: Female Bluebirds with High Aggression are Better at Coping with Noise Pollution
Presenter Heather Kenny is a Humboldt County native who grew up in Trinidad and earned a BS in Wildlife Biology from UC Davis in 2014. She grew her interest in birds by volunteering at the Klamath Bird Observatory, and working as an Avian Ecology Intern at the Archbold Biological Station in Florida. She is particularly interested in the behavioral variation between individual birds, and her research has focused mostly on understanding how variation in behaviors like aggression and boldness influence individual fitness and population success under different environmental conditions. Heather is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She earned a Master's degree in Biology from the College of William & Mary in August 2020, where she studied Eastern Bluebird behavior. For this presentation, Kenny will share her Master’s Degree research where she found that female aggression levels influenced whether bluebirds settled in noisy or quiet breeding sites, and partly determined the effect of traffic noise on parental care of nestlings. It is important for biologists and wildlife managers to understand the variety of ways that individual birds respond to human-caused stressors like noise pollution because it provides insight into how populations might evolve in response to them. It also allows folks to tailor more effective management and conservation strategies. Visit rras.org to obtain the Zoom presentation link.
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