Courtney Linkous just finished her first year in the Guindre-Parker lab and her first year in the Master of Science in Integrated Biology program; Kilgour is also pursuing her MSIB. Like Kilgour, Linkous earned her bachelor’s degree in conservation biology and performed most of her research in the field. That has changed since arriving at KSU.
“Previously I haven’t done a lot of lab work, so with this research I get to do a lot of lab stuff,” she says. “I’ll be looking at oxidative stress, which we need blood plasma for, and I get to do some feeding platform trials, which means we’ll get to analyze videos later on, so that’ll be interesting.”
Within 5 weeks of finding eggs at the site, the nest boxes are empty, save for the twigs and leaves. Guindre-Parker says starling parents generally raise two sets of chicks each breeding season, not necessarily in the same nest box as the season’s first chicks, so her team will continue to monitor the nest boxes as spring turns to summer.
After the birds have flown the coop, Guindre-Parker and her research team will head to the lab to analyze the blood and feather samples they’ve collected in hopes of adding to the knowledge surrounding how wildlife cope with urbanization. Ultimately, she says she hopes her research can offer solutions to the puzzle of how animals come to cope with stressful environments more generally, not just urban disturbances.