Feather Sampling from Neotropical Passerines

With the completion of UCLA’s NIH funded efforts to sample for influenza in neotropical migratory passerines (which collected cloacal swabs and corresponding feather samples), we are reverting back to our annual request for the banding community to collect feathers to support neotropical migrant conservation research. These collection efforts have proved an enormous benefit to the research community, allowing for both genetic and isotopic testing to be performed from feather samples to provide insight into migration connectivity, population demography, disease detection, genetic health, etc.

The neotropical passerine feather collection at UCLA’s Conservation Genetics Resource Center now contains over 100,000 feathers and last year nine different research groups from the Americas and Europe were able to utilize the collection for their studies (the LaMNA network is acknowledged in all publications emanating from feathers your organization has provided). We expect that the collection will become even more valuable as it’s temporal, spatial and species coverage is expanded and other analyses are developed for feathers including disease studies such as the WNV project described here.

One very exciting project now underway that has been made possible by the collection is a study by Keith Hobson of Environment Canada and Keith Larsen of Lund University to validate the North American isotope gradient maps used by a number of researchers to investigate migratory connectivity. They are performing isotope testing on over 2,000 feather samples of breeding bird recaptures from the collection.

We need your help!

The feather collection would not have been possible without the volunteer efforts of the LaMNA network community and coordination efforts at RSL. For information on how to participate in the feather collection efforts and recommended protocols, please see the flyer posted here. Remember that in order to collect feathers, you will need a feather pull amendment on your banding permit.

-John Pollinger, UCLA Center for Tropical Research
May 2010