– 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 text book.
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)
