field research with AD

it's summertime, 90'F and the temperature keep climbing up and challenging the 100F scale every afternoon. still, it's really great to put my feet back to the field. As I mentioned before I am a Ornithologist (biologist study birds). I do a lot of different things with birds, obviously... : ) the reason I did not mentioned it here much is because I tend to maintain this blog in a way that not talking about work... something other than work... but I guess it is hard to separate work and leisure time (sometimes). A good friend of mine, a professor from Poland - AD come to our lab in this past spring, he is a researcher studying plumage color in birds and how the color change depends on the external factors. General speaking, he is interested in why color changes overtime. It sounds easy to understand right? your t-shirt color will fade overtime, because the pigment might been washed out, sunlight might destroy the texture of the cotton or pigments in side it. Or simply due to other stain. It is! Like your t-shirt, birds' plumage has many different kind of textures and many kind of pigments and structure organization to generate the color we see. However, different than t-shirt user, birds has very interesting behaviors to protect their plumage and plumage color. Put this color fading in to it's environment and evolutionary context, the experiments become so fascinating to us... (ok, maybe too much of science, I will talk about it later...)

Here is some photos I want to share here, we had a great fun doing the field work together, it is about measuring plumage color in eastern bluebirds...