Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Common Ground Dove




Maria and Cameron (I hope I spelt the names right!) are in doing research on malaria in birds. It's not a form that humans can obtain - for those of you that were worried! They were using traps on the site to catch some birds. They caught this beautiful ground dove, and were showing me how they collect their data. They place them in a sack to weight them, and take a tiny blood sample. They then use callipers to measure things like beak width and depth. It was very cool. Maria is from Sweden and is doing graduate work in St. Louis, and Cameron is from Pennsylvania and working with her as a research assistant. They'll be back at the end of the month, so it will be interesting to see how the rest of their time in the Caribbean has been!