...You will undoubtedly be relieved to learn that this page is a haphazard grab-bag of introductions, acknowledgments, photos and links rather than a biography.

The Lahti Lab: Behavioral and Evolutionary Ecology

I just arrived at Queens College in the fall of 2009! I am currently setting up my laboratory, and am interviewing undergraduates, prospective masters and doctoral students, and postdoctoral research associates.

Other collaborators

Past and Present Podos Lab, University of Massachusetts

Jeff Podos was my postdoctoral advisor, and we have been collaborating on the planning and execution of the swamp sparrow song learning project since 2003. Our experiments are able to address the developmental and evolutionary questions they do because of a method of digital manipulation of bird songs that Jeff developed and refined during the 1990s. With help from Dana (below) and a team of assistants, we hand-reared and trained dozens of birds in the lab between 2005 and 2008. Jeff and Dana are continuing this project with another crop of birds raised in 2009.

Dana Moseley is a graduate student in the Podos lab. We have been collaborating on the swamp sparrow project, both the laboratory-based song learning and the field-based functional studies, since 2005. With help from friends and field assistants, we have continuously maintained a banded population of swamp sparrows, discovered their territories and mates, taken DNA and color and size measurements, recorded their songs, tracked their movements and nests, conducted playbacks on males, and brought nestlings into the laboratory.

Here I am with a bunch of UMass ornithocentric grad students circa 2007, taking a trip to a maple syrup joint in the beautiful Berkshires. From left to right, Dave Hof, Dana Moseley, Ben Taft, Kara Belinsky, Ana Gabela, myself, and Elijah Goodwin.

Here we have more lab funnery: at a party at my house, in our lab, and somewhere beautiful I evidently couldn't go.

Dan Ardia is the bearded fellow in the middle of our toast above, and also to the far right next to Ben and Kara. He was a Darwin Postdoctoral Fellow with me at the University of Massachustts. We collaborate on the laboratory tests of how solar radiation might interact with bird egg color to affect embryo viability.

Steve Johnson is on the right on the left picture. He recently received his Ph.D. at UMass for his work decoding and analyzing sequences of robin song, for which he amassed a pile of recordings and analyses that reached a height that has since become legendary. He also helped me establish the Quabbin Reservoir banded population of swamp sparrows in spring 2005, and has helped with the banding and recording in the years since then.

Domestic field sites

Prescott Peninsula, Quabbin Reservoir

The beautiful Quabbin Reservoir with its Prescott Peninsula is the perfect place to do field research-- on a great number of things, I suppose, but for me it has been perfect for swamp sparrows-- a well-defined population in a large wild area with restricted public access, about three hours northeast of Queens College. The folks at the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation have treated us very well for five years and counting.

We are regularly rewarded for getting up early to balance on tussocks, with sightings of moose, bear, mink, coyote, and fox (yes even we hardcore biologists never lose our fascination with animals that are big or kill things). The greenery here is vibrant and interesting as well. Our site fell squarely in the town of Prescott before it and four other towns were flooded for the Reservoir in 1937; so we see a combination of reclusive wild plants, long established introduced species, and even the occasional cultivar such as lilac or forsythia that has persisted all these decades. I have begun a list of the wildflowers of the site (posted here), both those in the flooded forest and marsh and those on the roadsides and fields. I encourage our students and visitors to use and augment it.

On the left Dana Moseley, who is midway through her graduate work based on these Quabbin swamp sparrows, is attempting to engage a fledgling field assistant in the joys of nature.

On the right with me are valuable veteran field and lab managers from the first three years of the project: Cosmo Laviola and Stephanie Wallace, both of whom were intelligent and reliable helps to us and our young birds. The marsh in the background of this picture has been the most productive part of our site at the "Forest Products Swamp" as we have mischievously named it (because of a sign that indicated that "Forest Products" were going to be removed from its boundary just during our first field season). Unfortunately, however, because of the actions of beavers, the marsh has been drying up, allowing snakes, chipmunks, and shrews better access to the swamp sparrow nests, causing a precipitous drop in sparrow reproductive success in this area: an interesting ecological cascade!

The family