General Updates
- William Kirkpatrick
- Mar 14
- 2 min read
I am surprised I have let my site go this long without an update! I’ll kick off where I left off in Spring 2023 and loosely catch you up on the line updates to my CV and my general life! I want to get back in the habit of regular life and research updates, and this post will catch us up!
Summer 2023 - Spring 2024
During the 2023 field season, I gathered parental behavior data and began a preliminary test of a field experiment. The subsequent Fall, I solidified the data basis for some of my preliminary dissertation results, which I presented at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) in Seattle during the January 2024 meeting. For my work during this period, I received the 2023 Harold and Margaret Hedges Scholarship in Ornithology from the Department of Biology at UArk. I was selected as a participant in the Animal Behavior best talk competition.
Throughout this period, I participated in outreach events at Washington and Gresham elementary schools. The students are allowed to handle preserved bird skins from our university museum collection, and I give fun facts and information about local bird species. I also participated in field trip days for 1st and 2nd graders where I demonstrated the ins and outs of biological research using a nest box system.
Summer 2024 - Spring 2025
Throughout my graduate studies, multiple undergraduates have assisted me with my project. Vincent Guarnene, Chris Carter, Julianna McCaulley, Destiny Guillory, Will Wilson, Wyatt Boehm, Vansh Singhal, and Salvador Barraza-Delbarco have helped in some capacity to assist with field work and processing data. Their proposals, posters, and papers have helped me manage my project as well as provide unique insights for me. Wyatt, Salvador, Vansh, and I will continue working together this year to produce some very cool (and very publishable?!) results!
Last field season, Salvador and I gathered metabolic data from nestlings and maintained monitoring of Eastern Bluebird and Tree Swallow behavior and nesting in our 200 box system. We expanded our previously tested experiment and applied heat and variable thermal treatments to randomly assigned boxes. Results are forthcoming but exciting!
This Fall and Spring, I’ve focused on writing my dissertation and teaching. Dr. Sarah DuRant and I are redesigning her Comparative Physiology Lab this Spring with a pedagogical twist. The students are committing to multiple week experiments and are expected to produce a scientific poster to be displayed in a forum at the end of the semester. They have been exposed to mist netting, bird banding, thermal stress experiments, statistical modeling in R, and other practical skills they can carry on and apply to their work.
On January 7th, I gave a talk at SICB 2025 in Atlanta on the (nearly finalized) results from my 3rd and 4th chapters.
Just a few days later in January, my second first author publication was accepted into the Journal of Thermal Biology! This quail behavior and thermal data was shared with me by Sarah and her colleagues at Oklahoma State. We found that Scaled and Northern Bobwhite Quail modify behaviors in response to multiple scales of the thermal environment.
I am currently hard at work on the rest of ny chapters! Check back here to see my progress!
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