Citizen Science Ecology Get to Know a Scientist SciStarter Blog 

STEM Career Q and A with Joe Siegrist

In this STEM Career Q and A, we talk with the lead of Project MartinRoost. Learn about his STEM career and how you can get involved in a citizen science research project. To meet more scientists and learn about their work, check out our Get to Know a Scientist series. Q: What citizen science project do you represent? Three projects: Project MartinRoost, Project MartinWatch, and the Scout-Arrival Study. Q: What’s your professional background? I have worked as a zookeeper, a naturalist, a field biologist, an educator, and now am president…

Read More
Citizen Science Ecology SciStarter Blog 

Project Martin Roost: A Scavenger Hunt in Your Backyard

This is part one of three in a collaboration between SciStarter and Career in STEM, in which writers will spotlight different citizen science projects, interview project leaders about their careers, and create educational content for teachers and students. This series is available from Science Connected, Career in STEM, SciStarter, and Discover Magazine.  As the sun sinks low below the horizon and the crisp night air begins to descend, a miraculous sight can be seen in many areas across the continental United States. Hundreds of thousands of birds will suddenly appear…

Read More
ravens Zoology 

Ravens Cooperate, but Not with Cheaters!

By Kate Stone Several recent studies have revealed that ravens are among the most intelligent species of birds and even species in general. Now, cognitive biologists from the University of Vienna add teamwork, cooperation, and avoidance of cheaters to the ravens’ already lengthy list of skills. “From the wild, it was already known that ravens are able to cooperate when, for example, mobbing predators. But using an experimental set-up working with captive ravens now allowed us to investigate how exactly they do so,” says Jorg Massen. In Massen’s experiment, two…

Read More
zebra finches Zoology 

Zebra Finches: Learning from Lovebirds

From our Friends at ResearchGate Lovebirds know what they’re doing. It only takes zebra finches days to choose a partner, and yet their relationships last a lifetime. That’s what Malika Ihle, behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, found in her recent study on the birds’ courtship behavior. We speak with her about the secret to finches’ love, and what people might learn from them. Are human love and bird love alike in any way? What could be similar to human love is that birds have individual rather…

Read More