Northern Wings – Connecting People and Birds of Northern Arizona

Doctoral Student Matt Jenkins Talks About His Bluebird Research in Northern Arizona

• Northern Arizona Audubon Society • Season 1 • Episode 6

Share episode

In this episode, you get two Matts for the price of one.  Matt Anderson interviews Matt Jenkins, a third-year doctoral student at the University of Arizona, about the fascinating research he’s conducting regarding bluebirds (both Western and Mountain) using data he’s collecting in Northern Arizona and elsewhere.  We talk about Matt’s fascinating journey, from his boyhood interest in birds to his scientific research exploring the evolution of behaviors over time and how they influence birds’ dispersal, range expansion, and developmental environments.  We also discuss the goals of Matt’s research, his data-collection practices, and more.  Here is a link to Matt Jenkin’s page on the University of Arizona’s website: 

     https://eeb.arizona.edu/person/matthew-jenkins

Thanks to Jay McGowan and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library for the use of the bird song clip and to Christina Vojta, NAAS steward for Kachina Wetlands, for her assistance with the bird song segment.  

Thank you for listening. Please visit our website and subscribe to our Instagram feed.

The Northern Arizona Audubon Society has been the voice for birds in Northern Arizona since 1972. Join us. Add your voice.

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome. This podcast is brought to you by the Northern Arizona Audubon Society, the voice for birds in Northern Arizona since 1972. We envision a future in which birds are thriving in Northern Arizona and throughout the world. Visit our website to learn more about this dynamic organization and the work it does for the love of birds and nature, especially in our part of the world. Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Northern Wings Podcast. My name is Matt Anderson, and today I have the great pleasure of talking with Matt Jenkins, a doctoral student in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology program within the College of Science at the University of Arizona. Matt's conducting research on bluebirds in northern Arizona and has been collecting data here throughout the region and delighted to have him here to learn more about that. Welcome, Matt. Thanks for having me. Yes, this is great. So your project is titled Evolution of Signaling Traits. Can developmental environment link competitive ability and plumage traits? There's a lockpack in that pithy title. Can you explain the research question and how you're exploring it in more detail?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so there's a well-documented eternally induced developmental effect on offspring that we see in bluebirds that my advisor worked on in her early career. And we know that this maternal effect directly influences the offspring's competitive ability. And so I wanted to further explore that by looking at the birds' actual plumage traits. So how does the developmental environment impact their plumage? But in addition, now that we know that the developmental environment also impacts their competitive ability, can we look at their plumage and also tell their competitive ability just looking at their plumage? So we want to see how all these different mechanisms kind of link together. Wow, that's a lot of pieces coming together for that.

SPEAKER_01:

So how would you define competitive ability? What would that look like in the wild?

SPEAKER_00:

So it's an organism's ability to acquire a territory, acquire a mate, gather resources, and produce offspring, essentially.

SPEAKER_01:

Excellent. That's really helpful. Thanks for that. So now that we have a better understanding of the research question, tell us a little bit about how you're going about researching it, the data you're collecting, where in Northern Arizona you're collecting that data, and maybe what you've found so far.

SPEAKER_00:

A lot of what I do is actually capturing the adult bluebirds at their nest boxes. So this is a cavity nesting species for those that don't know much about bluebirds. So we're actually able to work with them very closely at their nest boxes, which is really convenient for us. But we monitor their behavior pre-nesting season, so that's when you can actually see their aggressive and competitive behaviors in action when they're competing against other bluebirds or other species for those nest boxes. We take those observations. Once they actually lay their eggs, we're pretty attentive to those boxes. So we count the number of eggs, how many of those eggs actually hatch, and then we periodically measure the nestlings at different day stages. So for us in our lab, we do days 7, 11, and 14 to get their growth rate. We'll get small little DNA samples from them and then put bands on them, color bands and a USGS metal band as well to identify them in the future. That's kind of the a very broad overall description of what we do with the birds on a daily basis. We haven't, or I haven't, analyzed the data quite yet from Northern Arizona, so that'll be the goal for this upcoming semester. So most of what our findings are showing are from our older field sites in Montana. So that's where our lab usually works. That's where my PI has all of her field sites. So the data that I've analyzed so far comes from those birds. What we found is that there are links to birds' competitive ability based on their plumage, mostly with that red breast patch. So bluebirds have two different types of plumage. They have their structural blue coloration in their feathers, but they also have a red melanin-based pigment breast patch. And so we found that birds with smaller breast patches are actually more aggressive and better competitors than birds with larger breast patches, which is the opposite pattern of what we expected. We predicted that, you know, the more vibrant birds would be the more competitive, but it's not the case that we found so far. And so that's our current findings. Now with the blue coloration, that's where we found a link to the developmental environment. So we didn't find any links to the developmental environment on the red breast patch yet. But for the blue coloration, yeah, we we have so far.

SPEAKER_01:

And when you talk about the developmental environment, you're really talking about some of the maternal stresses and how that's reflected in birth order and things like that. Can we talk more about how that all works?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. So the maternal effect is caused by stress in the moms, and so bluebirds are really stressed out in the early breeding season because they have to find these cavities to nest in, which are hard to come by, especially good quality ones and good quality habitats. So you'll see bluebirds often competing for a really nice habitat in a good territory with those tree cavities or also a man-made nest box. And so we can actually directly manipulate the mother's stress, which my PI has done in Montana and other grad students. And so we can either add nest boxes or take them away to induce different stress environments. And so when those mothers are stressed, we've found that they actually produce really aggressive sons who then go off to disperse into new environments to colonize them and be, you know, better competitors. So essentially it's an adaptation from the moms that are in bad environments to make their offspring more apt and better suited to you know a stressful environment, so they're able to colonize better in new areas. And so that's kind of how a maternal effect works now. How she's actually doing that, we don't know. It's probably hormonally caused. So it used to be thought that androgens or higher testosterone was being pumped into these eggs, but that's kind of fallen out of belief now. So we're we're still kind of unsure how those mothers are actually doing that to their offspring. But it's a really cool adaptation on the bird's part to do that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Interesting. Matt, you mentioned a PI or a principal investigator. Tell us a little bit about the lab in which you're working right now, what its mission is, why you find it such a rewarding place in which to conduct research.

SPEAKER_00:

My PI or advisor is Dr. Renee Duckworth. Basically, when I was looking at grad schools, I was reading a lot of papers about a behavior, evolution of behavior in birds, and her name kept popping up. So applied to her, got accepted to the lab. And basically, what our lab looks at is the evolution of behaviors over time and how that influences macroevolutionary processes, such as you know, dispersal, range expansion, the developmental environment, how that kind of controls all of this. So that's essentially the current research focus, I would say.

SPEAKER_01:

Interesting. And what are some examples of other research being conducted within the lab by your peers?

SPEAKER_00:

I have two lab mates, Haley and Juliana, and Haley is studying something similar to me. She's also looking at the maternal effect in bluebirds, but she is looking more at the hormonal side. So she's looking at the actual embryos and the eggs and collecting those from those boxes. And then my lab mate Juliana is working with our population of zebra finches in the lab, and so she's looking more at the brain morphology and how that influences birds' personality over time.

SPEAKER_01:

That's some really interesting stuff. You mentioned that you're collecting data in Montana and a long-standing site up there. You're also collecting data here in northern Arizona. Yes. In Picture Canyon, at Kachina Wetlands, and at Heart Prairie. About how many boxes have you have there? What are you seeing in terms of the occupancy of the boxes? How many, how much research you've been able to conduct using those sites?

SPEAKER_00:

The sites here are really cool, and the habitat is really varied between all of the different sites up here. So at Kachina Wetlands, you know, it's a wetland habitat, so you get a great diversity of the birds, and where the bluebird boxes are, it's great habitat for them. So we see pretty high occupancy of those boxes at Kachina Wetlands. Picture Canyon, surprisingly, has low occupancy for bluebirds, but their main competitor, the ash-throated flycatcher, up here in northern Arizona, seems to dominate those boxes. And then at Heart Prairie, this is the first year we've had those boxes up that the Audubon Society helped put up with me. And surprisingly, we got pretty high occupancy. So there's about 40 boxes, 36 give or take it. Heart Prairie, and about, I I think, off the top of my head, about 14 of them were occupied. And I think 20 had nests built in them. So bluebirds will build a complete nest and then just not use it and go onto a different nest box.

SPEAKER_01:

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00:

And so those boxes were mostly dominated by the mountain bluebirds this season. Only a couple western bluebirds are out there. So pretty high occupancy for a first-year nest box location.

SPEAKER_01:

And the nest boxes that were put into Heart Prairie are ones that are designed specifically to accommodate both western bluebirds and the mountain bluebirds. Yes. Because one of your research interests is to see how those two species work together. Right. And what have you seen so far? What do you expect to see given the research that's already been conducted?

SPEAKER_00:

Based on previous data, again, collected by my PI up in Montana at Herfield sites, there's an interesting pattern where mountain bluebirds are the more dispersive of the two species. So they'll typically colonize an area first. And then over time, we've noticed that the western bluebirds, which are more aggressive, will outcompete the mountain bluebirds and kind of push them out and then dominate that nesting area. And so we're really interested to see if that same pattern is what's going to happen up here in northern Arizona because these are two different subspecies of both western and mountain bluebirds than the ones up in Montana. So, you know, they could be very different behaviorally, they could be different, you know, in their nesting preferences. We're just not sure yet. So it's interesting that just very preliminarily looking at that nest site, it seems like it might be the same pattern. It'll be cool to see what happens next summer and then the subsequent summer after that. Right.

SPEAKER_01:

So it's really exciting that you've got boxes in those locations that you can monitor. Are you interested in increasing the sample size by perhaps having people with nest boxes in their own backyards that are accommodating bluebirds to be part of your research?

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. You know, the talk I gave the other night that you were there for, a couple people came up to me afterwards and were like, oh, we would love to have a bluebird box in our backyard. So that's fantastic if people want to get involved and put a box in their backyard. I just got a new permit to set up a new field site at Buffalo Park here in town. That's exciting. Yeah, and then the Arboretum that I just gave a talk for, they want boxes up there as well. So two new field sites for next summer.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow. You can't have enough bluebirds. Oh, I'm so happy for you. Flagstaff's gonna be Bluebird Central. Oh my gosh, yes. And those are some great sites. Absolutely. So nice. Well, it's good to hear about that. And so that's a 2026 thing, do you think? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. So I'll start putting them up. Probably the same time we did the Heart Prairie side. So early winter.

unknown:

I think.

SPEAKER_00:

Before the snow starts setting in up here in Flagstaff. For those listening, when you put up bluebird boxes, you want to do it late fall, early winter before they start colonizing areas and taking over nest boxes and forming territories. So that's the time to do it.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. Well, it sounds like some of the volunteers up here, me included, need to start working on some more nest boxes for you.

SPEAKER_00:

You know? That's always great. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

How many did how many did you put in with at Heart Prairie?

SPEAKER_00:

35. 35 boxes. And then there's one that was already there that we left up.

SPEAKER_01:

I think it's really very cool that on the ground here in northern Arizona you have teams of volunteers who are doing some bluebird box monitoring. And so maybe you can talk about that for a little bit and how helpful that has been to you in your research.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's been super helpful. So because I also monitor field sites that I've set up down in southern Arizona. So I'm between Tucson and Flagstaff almost every single week. And so Northern Arizona Audubon Society, you know, I discovered them online because the the bluebirds down south, there's just not many of them. So I was looking for ways to increase my sample size. I discovered that y'all up here are already monitoring some trails. So that's when I reached out to Kay Hockley, the former president of NAAS, and she said, Yeah, come on up, let's do some research. And so the monitors for Kachina wetlands in Picture Canyon, I mean, that they're extremely vital to me because just with my time split, I have volunteers already going out and telling me what's there, so I can monitor or I guess adjust my schedule according to what's actually happening at those field sites. So it's been incredibly helpful this summer. I wouldn't be able to do it without the help of the volunteers for sure.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's nice to hear. I'm one of those volunteers out at Kachina Wetlands, and we work under the great leadership of Laurie Cruz. And it is just wonderful when your time comes up to go out there and look at the nest to see what's there, to see what has happened and just a what the short week between and when you're looking at it and when the last person did. And it's great to see the data that come out of that being used by you. And the data that we collect are uploaded through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's nest watch program to a big data set, which is then aggregated and helps researchers throughout the country. So it's nice that these efforts are contributing not only to your research but to citizen science in general.

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01:

So Matt, you've got nest boxes in a number of places. Montana, Picture Canyon, Hart Prairie, Cochina Welllands. How do you see those continuing or evolving in the next few years?

SPEAKER_00:

So the Montana nest boxes, I don't really work with those. That's my PI's nest sites. So most of the grad students in my lab go up to Montana. I'm the first one in the lab to kind of set up my own sites and do my own thing here in Arizona. That's one of the longest monitored nest box trails for Western bluebirds, are our sites in Montana. So it's a little over 20 years. For my sites here in Arizona, a lot of those are permit-based, like at Heart Prairie, the one I'm setting up at Buffalo Park next year, and also the Arboretum. So those are pretty constrained by time. So once I'm done with the project, those boxes might be taken down. Now, of course, at Kachina Wetlands and Picture Canyon, those have a you know robust group of volunteers that have monitored in the past and will continue to monitor those sites. So it would be great if the field sites that I've set up here could continue to be monitored and build up the population of bluebirds here in Flagstaff. But at the this current time period, it's just totally permit-based. And that goes for my field sites down south in Arizona as well.

SPEAKER_01:

The nest boxes that volunteers have built for the new project at Heart Prairie and replaced some of the older boxes at Kachina Wetlands were based on plans that you provided, Matt. They use a top opening design which has some advantages in the research environment, but may not in typical uses. What advice do you have for those who are purchasing nest boxes for their yards?

SPEAKER_00:

You know, the classic saying in wildlife biology is you build it and they will come. So bluebirds are not the pickiest, especially if you don't feel the desire to want to build your own box. There's plenty of pre-made options that you can just find in any hardware store, Home Depot, Lowe's. They all carry nest boxes. So most of those are going to be front or side opening. And that doesn't matter to the birds at all. That's just a preference for the humans that are actually cleaning out the boxes and checking them. So yeah, you could just go to the store, get a nest box, and put it up in your backyard. There's a few different methods for doing that, of course. The best is to put it on a metal conduit pole with some kind of predator guard, like a PVC pipe on the pole that prevents snakes and chipmunks from getting up in there. Because there's one thing predators love, it's it's baby bluebirds in those boxes. So we try to steer people away from putting them on trees. But if you have to do that, that's fine too. Just make sure that you're careful about checking those boxes because snakes can absolutely follow your path to get up those trees to those boxes. So, bottom line, it doesn't matter too much the design of the box, but always make sure you have some kind of predator control on those boxes, especially in urban areas in your backyard.

SPEAKER_01:

So, Matt, I had the good fortune of spending a morning with you as you banded Western bluebirds at Kachina wetlands. I was really impressed with how systematic you were in the process and how carefully you handled the birds, some of which were really, really quite small. Can you walk us through the process you used to capture birds, collect data, band them, and maybe a little bit about how the data you're collecting are being used?

SPEAKER_00:

Like I said, I'm mostly capturing the adults, and so you could do that with bluebirds and a few different methods. The one that we like to use the most that's the least invasive is what's called potter trapping. So they're almost like have a heart traps where the you know the birds will go into a little cage, step on a bar, and a door shuts behind them. And so we'll set up a little feeder tray in front of the box with mealworms that we bait them, which they love. We'll put the potter trap on top of that with a little cup of mealworms underneath, and then they go in trying to get the worms when we catch them. But some of them, like the male, the the my famous male I captured yesterday, is too smart for that and knows that after a couple hours I give up to take the trap away and he gets to enjoy his mealworm snack.

SPEAKER_01:

Just for the listeners out there, Matt and the male at Nest Box 5 have been engaged in an epic battle over the course of the spring 2025. And Matt prevailed yesterday and was finally able to band this blue bird.

SPEAKER_00:

He's the only blue bird that's ever hit me on the head checking the nest box. So he's pretty good, pretty defensive of his kids, which is awesome. But yeah, he's been very hard to catch. Very smart bird. Okay and his mate, to be fair.

SPEAKER_01:

Alright, so back to the question I originally asked about the process.

SPEAKER_00:

If potter traps don't work, we can use what's basically a trapdoor mechanism called a box trap. We just put that on the inside of the box, they triple wire, it catches them in the box. So we use that for really fussy birds. But then that actually goes back to nest box design. Another reason top opening boxes are the best, in my opinion, is so the box traps actually fit really well in there. But we don't like to use those, they can have some unintended consequences, like you know, the birds might abandon the box because they're now scared to go in it. That doesn't happen often, but it does happen, so we try to avoid that. And then the last method, which is a last ditch effort, is mistnetting the bluebirds. So we'll put up, you know, a mist net, which are commonly used in bird banding, just right in front of the box and they'll land in it as they go in. That's actually how I had to capture that male and his mate yesterday was with a mist net. So those are how we capture the adults. Now, the nestlings are great because they're just in the box, they can't fly. So we'll go in there and collect them, take them out, we'll walk pretty far from the nest so that the parents don't notice. And then yeah, that's when I take my different measurements.

SPEAKER_01:

So I think And one of the things that I really appreciated about the way that you did that was that you took the nestlings out in batches so that the adults could continue to feed the ones who are in the nest, and you really minimized the time that they were away from the nest and their parents. Right.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, we try to make everything as quick as possible, especially for those nestlings. We don't want them to be stressed out. So when they're younger like that, yeah, we split the batch into halves if we can. So I'll take maybe two nestlings at a time or three and leave the other two to get fed by the parents. The parents still think the nestlings are in there, so they're not stressed, and then the babies that we take away are they're pretty calm at that age. They don't really know what's going on, as far as I know. So we'll take them, take them a little bit away from the nest, and then I'll start getting my measurements on them. We start with what's called the tarsus, which is their lower leg. We'll measure the tarsus, the bill, and then this is really critically important for my research. And so, again, my PI, through years of research, has found that we can actually identify the maternal effect in the nestlings if it's going on around day seven through eleven. And so there's that sex-biased hatching order. So if the female's really stressed, she's going to be producing males early on in the nest versus the females. And so we can get those measurements from their wing and their tail. So you can tell what order they actually hatched in based on their wing measurements at those early stages. Now, when they get a little bit older, that can get muddied by, you know, maybe one bird just happens to be fed more by the parents, or that's when their individual personalities really start coming out. But yeah, early on we can see if that maternal effect is happening in that nest just by a wing and a tail measurement. So, and we know that's repeatable because way back in the day, some poor grad student in field techs had to camp out at those nest boxes for an entire day, no matter what the weather was, and wait for each egg to hatch in those nests. So I get to reap their the rewards from their hard work, and now we have this beautiful repeatable system where we can see exactly if those females are you know stressed out or not, just based on their nest slings measurements. And then after we get those basic measurements, we'll take a very tiny little blood sample that we use for genetic analyses. Um and then for the adults, we'll take a small little tail feather, R five, for those listening. We'll take that for plumage analyses. And then I actually photograph the adults so to get their breast patch measurements.

SPEAKER_01:

I see.

SPEAKER_00:

And the plumage analyses look at color or anything else? Color, that's all I use the plumage for, is just is just. Plumage variation. We can actually get, if we can't get a good blood sample from them, we can also get genetic, you know, samples from their feathers as well.

SPEAKER_01:

We're gonna take a short break to hear more from the Northern Arizona Audubon Society. And when we come back, we'll tackle the name that song challenge and continue this terrific discussion with Matt. Welcome back, everyone. Ready to test your skills in identifying bird songs? I'll even drop a hint. The song I'm about to play belongs to an active, colorful bird that is often found in pine oak riparian woodlands with dense undergrowth. Are you set? We'll reveal the species at the end of this podcast. Here we go. Okay, Matt, let's use your research in a practical way. So I'm at one of Northern Arizona Audubon's fantastic birdwalks. This one's a Kachina wetlands, and we spot a group of bluebirds in the field on the mulins. What can we infer from their coloration, from the melanin patches, those kinds of things?

SPEAKER_00:

So to the trained eye, the more vibrant looking bluebirds are typically going to be your older birds. So they get more vibrant after their second year. And so that's how we actually age bluebirds in our research. So we age them at nestling, we call them second years, and then after second years. So second year individuals, those feathers that you see, they actually grew in the nest. And then after that second year is when they molt them and get a little bit more vibrant. So if you see a second year individual next to an after-second year individual, it's pretty clear which of the two are older. Other than that, it's pretty hard to infer, you know, what their behaviors might be just based on their plumage. So that's why we have to run, you know, the experimental tests that we do to actually correlate the behaviors to the plumage. But that's one really cool way that you can, you know, tell just by looking at them the age of those birds right next to each other.

SPEAKER_01:

Matt, I read this wonderful article you wrote about the Azure bluebird, a distinct subspecies of the eastern bluebird, which was published in the Audubon Southwest newsletter in June 2024. The article was subtitled The Charismatic Bird of the Sonoran Sky Islands. I thought the article was beautifully written, and I really enjoyed the information you shared on both your early interests in birds and your transition from the East Coast to Arizona. Can you tell us more about how and when you developed your academic interests and your path to conducting research in northern Arizona?

SPEAKER_00:

I think I was born to be a scientist. So every day I was out in the backyard catching little critters and trying to figure out why they were doing what they were doing. So I was always asking those how and why questions. And I think a big part of it, I'm not even sure he remembers this, my interest in birds, a lot of it actually came from my dad. So I was born on a military base, and my dad was in the Marine Corps. And every day he'd, you know, get off work, he'd take me for a walk in the woods, and we'd hear the bard owls, which is my favorite bird, hooting in the woods, and that was awesome. And I've just never forgotten that moment. And it kind of carried into my adult life as well. When I was around eight years old, I wrote a letter to myself saying my dream was to go to the University of Arizona and become a professor studying wildlife.

SPEAKER_01:

Is that right? Yeah. You knew at that age, how would you pick out a University of Arizona?

SPEAKER_00:

You know, I'm I'm not exactly sure. I probably meant to say Arizona State. So my mom took my sister and I on a vacation to see the Grand Canyon. Okay. So I will never forget. We landed in Phoenix and I left the airport. Second we walked outside, I said, I want to live here. Yeah, I distinctly remember that moment. Now I don't remember much from the trip, but I remember that moment. And then afterwards, it was for like a school project where I wrote that letter to myself. Of course, forgot about it as I grew up and I went to college to actually become a veterinarian. That dream kind of ended quickly after my first semester. And then it wasn't until junior year I was working in a lab on a project, and my mentor for that project really inspired me to pursue graduate school. I knew I loved teaching by that point. I had taught informally with wildlife education, training raptors, and teaching the public about that. But that project really inspired me to pursue research as well. And so after that, I was I was dead set on grad school for my junior year in college. But so it did definitely started from an early age and then carried on into what I do now.

SPEAKER_01:

So, Matt, the path between an eight-year-old having an epiphany that he wanted to become an ornithologist to where you are now as a third-year doctoral student at the University of Arizona has been filled with lots of hard work. What advice would you have to people who are considering pursuing a career in research, particularly related to ornithology?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so I always say the best attribute you can have if you want to pursue this is passion and drive. You have to have a good work ethic. And so I had a pretty, I wouldn't say unorthodox path through grad school. It was really hard for me transitioning, honestly, from high school to college. I had very good grades in high school, but then college started, wow, it's a completely different ballgame. But what most people are interested in is your experience and the connections that you have. So for any undergraduates interested in pursuing graduate school, make sure you get out and try and get involved with as much stuff as you can early on. So get involved with research projects, get involved with citizen science, talk to your professors, go to office hours. You want to have those solid connections. The one I was accepted to was with a professor I worked for during undergrad, Dr. Brian Lagerhans. Shout out to him at North Carolina State University. Well, I went on a study abroad research project with him and then worked in his lab senior year. And I took a gap year after college after my rejections, and I finally just asked him, I said, Hey, can I be your master's student? He said, I've been waiting for you to ask all this time. I'd be happy to have you in the lab. So it was building that foundation of connection. He saw my work drive, my work ethic, and that really pushed me forward. And, you know, through him and all of my experiences during my master's. That's how I found my PhD advisor, and she saw everything I had done and pushed through, and that's why she was interested in me as a student. Don't worry too much if you have a couple C's or even a D in your transcript. That's not going to hold you back long term if you have that drive and that passion. That's the key thing. So if you want something, you're gonna make it happen. You just have to have that drive to make it happen to begin with.

SPEAKER_01:

So, Matt, it was great hearing about your academic journey. Uh and the advice that you give is so useful. Thank you for that. What is next for you after your doctorate? Where do you plan on going and what are your aspirations for the future?

SPEAKER_00:

So after the PhD, it's time to go on and get a postdoc. Where that's going to be is still up in the air, but I'm starting to look at different positions here and there. And then hopefully after that, I can start applying to be a professor. I would love to continue in academia and I love teaching, love research. It's the the perfect route for me. So I'm excited to see where life takes me.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, Matt, it's been a pleasure talking with you today. I know I speak for our region's birders and our birds. When I wish you the best with your exciting and very important research, and the best as you continue this terrific journey that you have towards your doctorate and beyond. Thank you for being with us today.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you for having me. This was great.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, it's time to reveal the name of the species singing the beautiful song we heard earlier in this episode. It's the Painted Red Start, a gorgeous bird that both Matt and I saw for the first time in Madeira Canyon. Well done to those of you who identified the species. We're grateful to Jay McGowan and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library for the use of this bird song clip. We hope you've enjoyed this podcast. Please visit our website at northern ArizonaAudubon.org and consider joining the Northern Arizona Audubon Society or your local bird group to support the work they do to help birds. And above all, we hope you will continue appreciating and protecting birds and the places they need.

Contributor

Matt Anderson

Host