BCS Lab at AOS 2024!
Stasha Lysyk and Lilli Gaston
This fall, some lucky folks from the Biodiversity Conservation Solutions Lab took a trip to Colorado for the 2024 American Ornithological Society conference! The week-long conference covered all things birds while providing a great networking and knowledge-sharing opportunity for our lab in beautiful Estes Park!
Lilli’s Highlights from AOS 2024!
For me, the #1 highlight of the conference (besides all the cool research and even cooler people) was definitely the location. Just outside of Rocky Mountain National Park, we wandered past roaming elk harems and bugling bulls on a daily basis. I saw some lifers, including many mountain bluebirds and pygmy nuthatches (major highlight), and a Townsend’s solitaire! However, with the stunning mountain views came the startling change in elevation…every walk from the cabin to the dining hall felt like we were climbing Mt. Everest.
Some other highlights included participating in a round-table discussion about changing harmful eponymous English bird names. It was a really cool opportunity to learn about all the complexities surrounding the issue and share ideas about how to move forward. Other highlights included participating in the 5k Ptarmigan Ptrot, presenting my own research in the bioacoustics symposium, attending late-night poster sessions with a beer in hand, exploring the nearby town of Estes Park, and going off on my own personal adventure to explore Colorado when the conference came to an end.
Stasha’s Highlights from AOS 2024!
For a girl from Alberta, going to AOS in Colorado and being in the Rockies was almost like visiting home, albeit with a lot more pine trees! Hanging out with black-billed magpies again (which aren’t in Ontario) was very heartwarming and seeing new birds like the pygmy nuthatch (also a major highlight) or a new morph of dark-eyed junco and uncommon birds for me like Stellar’s jays and mountain bluebirds was really nice!
Conference highlights (other than the ones Lilli already mentioned) included some fantastic keynote and plenary speakers and the opportunities to learn so much about different conservation research. Some of the speaker’s perspectives on conservation really inspired me like the takeaway that we need to try and preserve complicated landscape dynamics, not just landscape areas for biodiversity conservation. This was really apparent in other talks discussing conservation research of grassland birds following fire management or bison grazing strategies. I was so excited to present my research at the poster session and had a lot of fun just talking with people all about window collision solutions. It was a wonderful opportunity to talk with not only researchers and fellow graduate students but also with practitioners at US Fish and Wildlife Service or US National Park Services about the importance of treating windows and treating them well to prevent collisions.
Sillier highlights definitely included hanging with my friends and colleagues, doing shockingly well at the bird night trivia, and roaming the park while carefully dodging the bugling elk bulls and his harem.