Golondrinas - Ithaca

site photo

Peter has only been working on swallows for a year and a half, but he is already the expert on all our databases, and he brings to Golondrinas 20 years of experience working with Stephen Emlen in Panama (on Jacanas) and in Kenya (on Bee-Eaters another aerial insectivore!). Peter loves field work (“The tougher it is, the more I like it!”). In February 2001 he escaped the joys of database management to direct construction of a 12m suction insect sampler at the Hill Bank site, Belize. He is also spear-heading, with Sacha Heath of the Pt. Reyes Bird Observatory, the cultivation of nest-box populations of Tree and Violet-green Swallows at 6500' elevation in the Mono Basin of California.

Ithaca, New York USA
42.50^o N, 76.46^o W

Co-coordinators:
David W. Winkler
Peter H. Wrege

The Ithaca Golondrinas Site is the site where the original techniques and data-collection methods have been developed for studying the life history and ecology of the Tree Swallow (Tachycineta bicolor). This longitudinal study was initiated in 1985, with the erection of 106 nest boxes at Cornell’s Experimental Ponds Facility (upper left quadrant of aerial photo below), approximately 10 km north of Ithaca. We monitor a total of 468 boxes on five different parcels of Cornell land, but our designated Golondrinas site is the original site, “Unit 1,” where we maintain a field laboratory and the Rothamsted insect sampler. Every box is situated so as to be 20 m from its nearest neighbor and within 3 m of open water. Our occupancy rates are approximately 67%, so we have an average of about 310 active nests to monitor on Cornell land and about 70 active nests at Unit 1. Tree Swallows are by far the commonest species in our boxes. At Unit 1, House Wrens (Troglodytes aedon) are discouraged from nesting, and we have an average of about one nest of Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) and on of Eastern Bluebird (Sialia sialis) at Unit 1 every year.

All our sites are part of a matrix of agricultural land, suburban low-density housing and second-growth deciduous forest.

David (aka “Wink”) has been studying Tree Swallows near Ithaca, New York, since 1985. He began sampling insects and studying (with F.H. Sheldon) the phylogenetic relationships among swallows world-wide in 1988. And he has been studying parental care, timing of breeding, egg and clutch size, foraging ecology and dispersal at the Ithaca site. Winkler’s technician in the early 90’s, P.E. Allen, erected boxes for Mangrove Swallows in Panama , and for Bahama Swallows on Abaco. Since then, Wink has been talking up Tachycineta studies in Venezuela , Peru and Argentina and throughout North America. The real potential of Golondrinas de las Americas started to bear fruit, however, with the creation of a study in Belize (with David Tzul), with boxes and insect sampler, that has the prospect of continued funding .in partnership with the Wings over America program of the Nature Conservancy. Stay tuned for much more!