Jasmine Cuellar spends summer with the songbirds

By Sian Wilkerson

Early on a recent sunny morning, Jasmine Cuellar was already out in her canoe, paddling down the James River near Deep Bottom Park in eastern Henrico County. Her destination: a small wooden box jutting out of the water.

Multiple times each week, about 30 minutes southeast of Richmond, the rising fourth-year environmental studies major at Virginia Commonwealth University makes this trip to learn about a species of small migratory songbirds with distinctive yellow plumage. Cuellar's research, which began last year, examines the relationship between the growth rate of prothonotary warbler nestlings and the temperature of their environment.

A system of more than 60 nesting boxes is Cuellar's natural laboratory, and behind the door of this one, a small clutch of days-old birds huddled together in a mossy nest. One by one, Cuellar measured each bird's weight and photographed its wings. It takes roughly 11 days for the young birds to leave the nest, and in that time, Cuellar will visit each clutch twice to collect data - once on day 4-5 and then again on day 8-9.

Her schedule is dependent on both the tides and the nestlings themselves: "They're born when they're born," she said. "I can't control it."

Not that Cuellar minds. Her passion for birds and avian conservation, which she described as all-consuming, is apparent - but it also took some time for her to find.

After graduating high school without a clear idea of what she might want to study in college, she went straight into the workforce. At age 29, she came to VCU to study environmental science, and soon after, she began volunteering for the bird-window collision campus study. She discovered her love of birds after seeing a Cape May warbler for the first time, and from there, a new fascination - and research interest - took flight.

In addition to her research and work with the Avian Ecology Lab, which is led by professor Lesley Bulluck, Ph.D., in VCU's School of Life Sciences and Sustainability within the College of Humanities and Sciences, Cuellar co-leads Birders at VCU. She helped create the student-run organization this past spring, and while the club is primarily focused on birdwatching, it also integrates conservation and education.

"I think birdwatching is for everybody, and I think a lot of people just need to get the opportunity," Cuellar said. "It does take a lot of patience, but it's a good way to get outside and connect with the environment and enjoy being in the moment."

Cuellar's research project on prothonotary warblers began last year as an intern with the Rice Rivers Center, a field station along the James River in Charles City County that is considered VCU's river campus. This summer, she expanded the project to include data such as parental and nestling behaviors, which she captures with cameras deployed inside the boxes. Her work is supported by five different grants, including one through VCU's Baldacci Student Experiential Learning Endowed Fund, which provides financial support to humanities and sciences majors pursuing opportunities such as internships, conferences, research and study abroad.

Eventually, Cuellar will use the data for her thesis as she completes the life sciences school's accelerated bachelor's to master's environmental studies program. While the data still to be processed and analyzed, Cuellar is already considering some big-picture questions.

"For instance, last summer we saw a negative relationship between temperature and growth rates, [meaning that] as temperature increased, growth rate was decreasing," she said. "But what does that mean? If climate change is increasing the temperatures, that might not be good for these birds, who are experiencing hotter and hotter temperatures for longer and longer - but we don't know for sure."

With the additional data collected this summer, Cuellar hopes to get a better understanding of the factors that could be influencing the health of these nestlings, with potential wider implications.

"No one thing is just impacting one bird species," she said. "It's like a cascading effect: If this species is impacted, then another species is impacted, and so on," all the way up to humans. "So to look at how one thing impacts one species at one period of time, it doesn't tell a full story … but everything's connected."

Cuellar likened it to one piece of a very large puzzle: "Taking that one piece out, that bird goes extinct, we don't know what kind of effect that could have."