Ph.D. Candidate’s Research Finds Ornithologists Favor Flashy, Familiar Songbirds

Ph.D. Candidate's Research Finds Ornithologists Favor Flashy, Familiar Songbirds

It's no secret that some species inspire more excitement among birdwatchers than others - an eye-catching warbler compared to a so-called "little brown job," for example.

New University of Toledo-led research suggests that ornithologists share these biases toward fan-favorite species. Published this month in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, the study raises questions about how uneven research attention may affect conservation efforts supporting lesser-known songbirds.

"We need data to inform conservation efforts," said Silas Fischer, who led the collaborative research. "For some species we don't know enough to determine whether they're at risk and, if they are, what steps we can take to protect them. We stand to lose a lot when we neglect visually unremarkable and geographically distant species."

Fischer is a doctoral candidate studying ecology and organismal biology at UToledo, which recently received R1 status placing it among the country's top-tier research universities by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. Fischer credits their advisor, Dr. Henry Streby, an ornithologist who utilizes novel and conventional methods to collect field data and expedite wildlife ecology research, with attracting them to the University.

"I had read a lot of his papers on songbird post-fledging and migration ecology," recalled Fischer, who cemented an interest in ornithological research through a National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program at Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico while a student at Ball State University. "It was a little bit like meeting a celebrity."

Through a master's thesis and now doctoral dissertation at UToledo, Fischer has continued to study the songbird that first piqued their interest as an undergraduate. For the thesis they defended in 2020, they completed an intensive demographic study of the gray vireo, a small songbird native to southwestern United States and northern Mexico, using several advanced methods to track the birds and document their annual cycles.

Now as a doctoral candidate, Fischer is building on this foundation to explore the impacts of climate change-driven droughts on their population dynamics.

"You'd think that a desert species like the gray vireo is adapted to heat and drought, but we're finding that even desert species are being pushed beyond their physiological capacity," Fischer said.

With years invested in researching a species whose drab coloring is unlikely to excite any but the most meticulous birdwatchers, Fischer was perhaps particularly sensitive to the perception that fancier and more familiar birds tend to draw attention - and, often, research opportunities - at the expense of the gray vireos of the world.

In the recent research, Fischer sought to put data to that perception through an intensive bibliometric analysis of academic literature on nearly 300 bird species in North America.

Fischer and their collaborators scored the species according to three factors subject to human bias: visual appeal as identified by characteristics like size, color and crest or other extraordinary features; familiarity as identified by the species' range size; and accessibility as identified by the number of universities within a species' range. Then they identified trends within research efforts on these species, analyzing more than 27,000 academic articles published between 1965 and 2020.

The findings backed the perception that inspired the research, with species scoring in the top 10% on visual appeal, like the tree swallow with its white and iridescent blue-green coloring, studied three times more on average than species scoring in the bottom 10%.

Overall researchers found that 45% of the variation in publication trends can be explained by visual appeal, familiarity and accessibility, suggesting factors other than research gaps and conservation needs steer ornithologists in identifying the subjects of their research.

"This study is an important reminder that scientists are humans. We put a lot of effort into designing studies to collect data that are representative and unbiased, but we don't often think about bias when we're choosing what to study in the first place," Streby said. "This study and several others on plants and other animal taxa come together to show we have not been doing a great job of checking our biases at the door when choosing what to study, what research to fund and even what to spend conservation dollars on."