Diet and feather development

Noah Andexler is examining what factors impact the accuracy of aging guides. Raptor researchers use aging guides, like the one pictured below, to age nestlings by comparing feather development with known age birds. Aging nestlings is critical for back calculating hatch date, which is important for understanding the timing of breeding, which is important for understanding the effects of climate change. Despite the importance of these guides, we suspected that not all birds develop their feathers at the same rate, so Noah investigated the effect of prey consumption on feather development and thus the accuracy of the aging guide - to help understand the limitation of aging guides. He found that in general the aging guide that we use are all accurate but found a positive correlation between food consumption and feather development and the amount of deviation from what is expected - given nestling age. Essentially, the more nestling ate the faster their feathers grow, suggesting they prioritizing feather growth and demonstrating some plasticity in feather growth rate. He also found that early hatching nestlings develop faster. We have often found that earlier nesting birds perform better, and this is just another example. Noah has learned a ton about designing research questions, data management and analysis and is working towards publishing this work. Noah Graduated from the Ui