Janis Dickinson, Walt Koenig, Alan Krakauer, and other students from MVZ presented papers at the biennial meeting of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology in July. Their papers focused on sex ratios in bluebirds, reproductive partititioning in acorn woodpecker breeding groups, and cooperative male courtship in turkeys. In the second year of a five year NSF grant, Janis an a postdoctoral associate, Andy McGowan, who will arrive from England in January, are gearing up to conduct mistletoe removal experiments to examine the impact of mistletoe abundance on the proliferation of bluebird dynasties. Janis continued a collaboration with a group European ecologists, led by Bernt-Erik Saether (Norway), to use long-term data of the sort gathered in the bird studies at Hastings to examine extinction probabilities in natural populations of birds.

   Janis and Walt are in the final throes of editing a volume entitled, “Ecology and Evolution of Cooperative Breeding in Birds”, which will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2003. Some of the research described in this book was featured in an article published in The New York Times on 29 October, which focused on the benefits accruing to offspring that delay dispersal and elect to stay home with their parents instead. As we might expect based on current trends for college students returning home to live, evidence suggests that stay-at-home offspring gain benefits from easy access to food and other resources. The studies of cooperative breeding in acorn woodpeckers and western bluebirds were compared to studies of the Siberian Jay, in which offspring stay home for up to three years, but never help at their parents’ nest. According to Jan Ekman’s research group at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, young jays gain from parental nepotism in allowing them access to food and providing vigilance against predators.
Spring bluebird intern, Dai Shizuka, returned after a summer banding birds in Costa Rica, and has continued working for Janis Dickinson. Katy Greewald arrived in early October, also to work on the bluebird project. Dai and Katy overlapped as students at Brown University and are gathering data on parental nepotism in winter groups of bluebirds, the phenology of winter berry crops eaten by bluebirds, the condition of the birds based on measuring the growth bars in their feathers, and patterns of plumage moult. They have identified nearly 30 bluebird family groups living on territories at Hastings and Rana Creek.

     Walt Koenig was pleased to see his paper with Joe Haydock in the Proceedings of the National Academy published (see recent publications). Walt and Lauryn Benedict published a paper that once again emphasizes that acorn woodpeckers do not gather acorns to eat the occasional insect grub found in the acorn. See also: MacRoberts, M. H. 1974 Acorns, woodpeckers, grubs, and scientists. . Pacific Discovery 9-15. Walt gave a seminar at the University of Nebraska, added a paper to the recent symposium on oaks, and was busy with the book project.
     Mark Stromberg was busy with many administrative duties, but did some research. Mark's project to see a book on the California Grasslands continues. Mark and Paul Kephart have developed the format and funding for the project, and it now involves a taxonomist, a computer programmer, and will be largely produced on a CD. Mark and David Donnenfield wrote a script and filmed segments of an overview video of California Grasslands, for CNGA with Packard Foundation funding. Chris Meacham is now on the project as we hope to include a non-technical, digital key to the grasses with links to existing web sites that update information. Mark continued to assemble the literature on California grasslands and prepare the content of the book. Mark's paper on coastal California grasslands appeared, and he pulled together another paper from Jason Hamilton's thesis done at Hastings documenting that Nassella can live hundreds, if not thousands of years. This was accepted by Madrono for publication in the winter of 2002-03. Mark participated in an invited symposium at the annual Ecological Society of America meetings in Tucson, Arizona and was invited to a week-long working group at NCEAS to consider the relationships between productivity and diversity, using data from the coastal grassland work. Mark attended the annual meeting of the Organization of Biological Field Stations in Kellogg, MI, where he was again elected to serve on their national board in the capacity of developing networking capacity at field stations. Mark continues to serve on the NRS Information Management Committee and worked many hours testing the new User Information Management system being developed to help users sign in online at NRS field stations and to capture a summary of the data they collect. By October, all users at Hastings were required to use this new "RAMS" (Reserve Administration Management System) which is hosted on the James Reserve servers in the San Jacinto mountains. ( see: Hastings Home Page- User Sign In) The Hastings web site is now hosted by Mike Hamilton and Kevin Browne at the James Reserve, and we no longer use the local internet service providers. Of course, our e-mail is still at UC Berkeley. Mark also is revising the Hastings web site with dynamic HTML; about 1/3 is now rewritten and the revised site should appear this winter. Mark worked closely with the Berkeley Natural History Museums and helped with the production of a visit and workshop on ecological informative put on by Bill Michener and James Brunt of the Long-term Ecological Research network office of UNM. This workshop was conducted at UC Berkeley Oct 28 and again at UC Davis on Oct 29.