Young, Gifted, and Wild About Birds – Mariamar Gutierrez Ramirez

Thursday, February 18, 7 p.m.
Migration is an ordeal for New England’s songbirds. Thrushes, cuckoos and other birds  travel vast distances to and from their breeding grounds.

Mariamar Gutierrez Ramirez, a Ph.D. candidate and a Ford Foundation fellow at UMass Amherst, is using quantitative magnetic resonance and Motus tracking technology to study the body condition and survival of songbirds in migration. What she’s learning could have a big effect on conservation decisions and on the birds’ well-being.

Mariamar has worked with migratory birds since 2002 across Central America and the U.S., and has extensive experience with field protocols for the study of breeding, wintering, and migrating birds. She has led the bird banding efforts for the UMass Amherst – Integrative Environmental Physiology Lab for 4 years.

She has experience training students and volunteers in bird monitoring techniques, including safe handling of passerine birds following the standards of the North American Banding Council.

For her graduate research, she works primarily in coastal Florida studying the spring stopover ecology of long-distance migratory songbirds. Mariamar has a B.S. in Biology from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua, and holds a M.Sc. in Natural Resources from Delaware State University.

About her presentation: Millions of migratory birds fly non-stop across the Gulf of Mexico from the wintering grounds in Mexico, Central, and South America to the breeding grounds in North America.

Songbirds complete their amazing journeys through a series of long flights, punctuated by stopover periods when birds rest and rebuild depleted energy reserves. Birds use fat and lean mass to power migratory flight, which is especially critical during and after crossing ecological barriers, such as the Gulf of Mexico.

Researchers from the UMass Amherst Integrative Environmental Physiology Lab have been using traditional field research and state-of-the-art technology, such as the Motus Wildlife Tracking Network, to evaluate the relationship between body condition and migratory decisions of birds that have completed a trans-Gulf of Mexico flight.

During this program, we will explore how birds fare after crossing the Gulf of Mexico in spring and how this may impact their timing and arrival to the breeding grounds in New England and beyond.