Tales of a Tailfeather | Explorers in the Field

(Birds chirping) (Soft music) - My relationship to the natural world was largely fostered through my grandparents who owned a farm in Idaho. We would go there every summer and we were free to roam and play in the forest and hang out. But I still didn't necessarily think I wanted to be a scientist. It wasn't until I got to understand the creative part of science, that it wasn't just about memorizing, like facts in a textbook. That's what really made me realize, oh wait, actually this is a creative process, and I love it.

My name is Kristen Ruegg. I am an assistant professor at Colorado State University, and I am the co-director of a project called the Bird Genoscape Project. (Soft music) The goal of the Bird Genoscape Project is to track hundreds of the most critically threatened birds. All kinds of birds are part of this project, from tiny songbirds, like the willow flycatcher, to my favorite, the charismatic burrowing owl. I think it's amazing that over half of the birds that are in North America actually leave during the winter months and go somewhere else and spend the majority of the year actually not here. Birds migrate south in the winter in search of better weather and more food, and they migrate back north in the spring in search of better habitat for breeding.

The main mystery with birds is where do birds migrate? The ability to track migratory birds has been a huge challenge for centuries. One of the challenges is there are tracking devices, but they're usually not small enough to be able to put on a migratory bird. So our thought was, well, if we could develop a technology that could use information within a single feather, like information in the DNA of the bird to track their migratory movements, then we could get information from every bird that comes through a monitoring station.

If I wanted to understand where my ancestors were from, I might take a DNA sample from me and send it off to a genetic ancestry service. They would compare my DNA against this huge database of DNA from many, many other people and be able to identify that my most likely ancestry is largely Norwegian. In a sense, that's what we're doing with the DNA found in a single bird feather. It's like genetic ancestry mapping for birds.

So here we have an American robin, one of our Genoscape species. This robin, yes, I see you. This robin migrates from the boreal forest in Canada and parts of the US and goes as far south in the winter as Mexico. And we also collect the feathers, the tail feathers, that we use for genetic analysis. (Uplifting music) The reason why we collect these feathers is because we can use the tip of the feather right here, which contains a little bit of DNA to tell you which migratory pathway this bird took and where it winters and breeds.

So what you have displayed here is the map for the Wilson's Warbler showing the location of the six populations. Each one goes to a different wintering area. For example, the Rocky Mountain population heads all the way down to El Salvador and Panama. Using their DNA, we can follow their migratory journey. All we need is DNA from the tip of a feather.

Now that the Bird Genoscape Project is helping us understand where and how birds move throughout the year, we can figure out the best ways to help them survive in a changing world. Uncovering the mysteries of bird migration may be the key to protecting them. (Uplifting music)