Hello! My name is Ryan and I am a 3rd year Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Major. I am from San Francisco, my favorite spot in Santa Cruz is Pacific Edge and another fun fact is that I own a 1974 Austin Mini.
See the abstract for my talk at the 2022 Fall Undergraduate Research Symposium
Foraging behaviors were observed in Gray Crowned Rosy Finch to establish the most abundant foraging effort in the environment. These birds are generalists and will foraging on multiple food sources. They reside in the alpine which is a vulnerable environment due to increasing global temperatures from climate change. To quantify their behaviors a time budget was created through 10 minute observations off of individual birds in contrasting environments (to best compare their opportunistic behavior). It was found that Rosy-Finches would forage on the most abundant resource depending on the observation site. With this data it would be important to continue monitoring this connection as the alpine is subject to change over the course of multiple years. Additional time budgets could be conducted as these observations took place right after the breeding season when fledglings were present and these observations do not capture the full scope of how a Rosy-Finch allocates their time.