Current Lab Members

Thibault's research addresses the impact of habitat on vocal communication in chickadees.  He is looking at the influence of food availability on both short-term and long-term structure and production of the fee-bee song of males.  The work is being conducted at the John Prince Research Forest in Ft. St. James, BC.

Angelique is investigating the social interactions, relative dominance and potential for hybridization in overlapping populations of Mountain and Black-capped chickadees.  The work is being conducted at the John Prince Research Forest in Ft. St. James, BC.

Naira Johnston, MSc 2011
Research Associate 2011-2012

Naira is monitoring the flight behaviour of raptors, particularly golden eagles, around the wind facility being constructed on North Dokie ridge in northern BC.  She is looking at evidence of detection of turbines and whether birds are able to avoid these during diurnal migration.

Mark had been the project leader for Stantec on our collaboration to monitor migratory behaviour around wind energy facilities.  He began his PhD in 2009 working on radar techniques to track nocturnal migrants, and in using these to create collision risk assessments of birds with wind installations.

Stefanie LaZerte, PhD Student

Stefanie is interested in the effects of urbanization on avian signalling.  Specifically, she is interested in how the interaction between both a noisier environment and also changes to the physical characteristics of the environment affect signal transmission and detection.  She is also interested in whether species-specific signals may pre-dispose certain birds to being less compromised by urbanization than other species, and she is currently testing these predictions with several species of chickadees in urban and rural settings in British Columbia.

Isobel is working on developing techniques, both visually and with radars, for tracking bird movement patterns and has been focusing this on assessing flight risks at the Prince George Airport.  Recently she has been working with our radar partner, RTI, to calibrate the tracking capacity of the radar - she is pictured here (in red) standing in front of the small training helicopter we had fly trajectories for her to track with the radar system.  We describe it as a "SmartCar with a propeller".  Another shot of Naira as well!

Dusty Walsh, BSc Thesis (2010)
Research Assistant (2010/2011)

Dusty has been testing a new nightvision system (iGen 20/20) for its application in tracking near-ground nocturnal bird movement around wind turbines.  He has been developing algorythms from the video files to estimate height of detected birds, as well as comparing the movement behavioour of birds near and between turbines at an active wind installation.

Past Lab Members