The Duck Tapes

Good Morning Friends and Happy New Year!

The new year can bring with it a myriad of emotions, sometimes both positive and negative. Depending on where you are the new year can mean the start of winter or it can mean the start of a new exciting routine. Often though it just represents a new opportunity. My wife mentioned to me recently that she does not “get” the “new-year-new-me” trend because if someone wanted to change how they lived why not just start immediately rather than wait till the new year. It is an interesting “habit” that most of us have to make these new year’s changes, but I think it stems from this idea that when one calendar year closes another opens with an opportunity to make it different than the last.

I started this new year with several goals in mind, one of them being to be more active on this blog for example. Now I use the term goal instead of resolution because I want it to be something that I am aiming towards, a new “identity” if you will. This would be opposed to a resolution that often feels very legalistic to me and seems to try to change the individual by focusing solely on the outcome rather than the driver of our actions. I want to be someone who writes, rather than making a rule over myself to write on some fixed schedule. It’s a slight difference but I maintain that inward change leads outward but not the inverse.

Now this is a research blog so why am I talking about the new year and goals? Well, over the next several blog posts I will be outlining the major steps and ideas that are shaping how I am currently thinking about my research. It is my goal to do this for several reasons but the primary two are; one as I start writing my dissertation I will need to write anyway and this will allow me to write about my work in a much different style than scientific literature, and two I get to share it with you which is fun in and of itself.

I hope that this new year is full of great opportunities for you to build better habits, change a mindset, write that paper, text that friend, or do any of the other things we as humans need to do. Most of all I hope you take the time to be intentional and seize the chance to change. There is no time like the present and as one of my best friends says, “The time will pass anyway whether I want it to or not so might as well make the most of it”.

Until next time keep your eyes to the sky

-Jonathan Dain

Left: Your truly, holding a cute duckling. Right: A domestic duckling about to be swabbed.

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This comedic line from the movie ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ flashed in my head, as I pulled this beautiful male mallard from the clover leaf trap so it could be sampled and released again. We were back on Nantucket this past week to monitor the local waterfowl population for avian influenza, specifically highly pathogenic avian influenza. We had been watching a group of about 100 ducks swim in this small pond, Consue Springs, in the middle of this quaint Island town. Having set up the traps that morning it was a waiting game as the tide receded, exposing more of the corn ‘kibble’ in the center of these one way heart-shaped traps along the edge of the water. All the ducks had to do was swim into the trap for a tasty meal, and then of course donate a few swabs and some blood to science but the meal is the more attractive factor here.

It was already midday when the first MALL (the American Birding Association four-letter code for Mallards) finally wiggled his way into the gold mine of corn. Now our lab has this saying that ‘birds begat birds’ so we were going to let this individual encourage the others to swim into the trap with him. Pretty soon we had three more ducks swimming alongside him, so it was time to spring the trap. After some deft dip-netting and some iconic duck hand passes we had all four MALL’s inside our holding cage to begin processing.

So you might be wondering what ‘duck processing’ might consist of, well you came to the right blog to find out. Let’s zoom out a little bit first. Remember we are looking for avian influenza (AI) infections in these birds, virus hunting If you prefer.  AI infections are typically contained in the respiratory and GI tracts which means in order to see if these birds are actively shedding any live virus, we need samples from both ends of the bird. The business end i.e. the mouth and the ‘dirty’ end i.e. the cloaca. Bonus points if our new friends decide to use its handler as a restroom, we love a good fecal sample here. So yeah, we are taking oral and cloacal swabs to test for infection. But wait! There is more! We all just went through a global pandemic so probably the first thing you might think of when I say virus is SARS-COV-2, and the vaccine. Well, I also think of antibodies, which can be super helpful in telling us if this bird has had an infection to AI in the past since antibodies are specific to the infection they fight. Where do you get antibodies….that’s right blood samples and more specifically the serum fraction of blood. We also want a blood sample to look at gene expression but that will be its own post, for now, we are just taking a small blood sample to test for antibodies and expressed genes. Finally, we just take some simple morphometrics such as wing length, some beak measurements, and weight.

All in all, this takes about 10 to 15 minutes and then our feathered friend is back on the water to go eat some more tasty corn.  The stunning male (or drake) MALL I pulled out of our trap did great and was back to swimming shortly. In total, we sampled ten adult ducks and two ducklings, which by the way are the cutest thing I have ever seen.

It is hard to explain the feeling of holding these magnificent animals knowing the weight of what you are doing. They are just so intricate and fascinating in their own right, their feathers for example are simply astonishing. This virus is truly a threat to the beauty of this world, it’s a privilege to be part of the solution. Until next time keep your eyes to the sky.

-Jonathan Dain

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Some fun pictures of our adventure:

Above: Melba holding a MALL hen (female) while Connor and I dipnet the others.

Above: The team and I next to Melba’s beautiful sign.

Above: Man can’t beat this view! Our two water clover-leaf traps worked great and gave us ideas to improve them.

Field Biology is the name of the game when it comes to wild birds. You simply cannot hope to study the ecology of these birds from the inside of a brick building. You have to venture out into the woods, shores, and oceans to find them. They often don’t come to you, which means exploring quite challenging places, while the birds are 50 feet in the air, or floating atop the waves. You are often cold, wet, hungry, and in environments that more than a few people would consider “less than optimal”. Yet the moment you see one of these gulls, ducks, or finches soaring, bouncing, or flinting through the air, the reason why you are out there in the first place becomes clear. Today I want to tell you about the unique resource that UMB has at its disposal.

Some of my preliminary research has taken me out of the university, where I am usually holed up reading the latest influenza paper, to the small island of Nantucket. Let me be the first to tell you this island is amazing, a short ferry ride and you are in a new world. First of all, it has this wonderful small fishing town atmosphere with beautiful buildings and amazing people. Secondly, this island is the home of so many different conservation groups. From the “Linda Loring Nature Foundation” to the “Marine Mammal Alliance Nantucket” there is a wide array of science happening on this relatively small crescent moon of land. Thirdly, the biodiversity of this island makes it an excellent place to study birds. There are so many places to get close to ducks and gulls in their native landscape.

However, simply going to an Island with no support can make a trip much more challenging, which brings me to the main thrust of this post. UMASS Boston has the amazing privilege of having a field station located on the Island! Not only that but it is managed by one of the nicest people I have ever met, Yvonne. She has given so much of her time to the support of researchers like my lab and created an environment where science and conservation can flourish. I know the rest of my lab would agree in saying our research would not be possible without the field station and its amazing manager. Below is a picture of the view from the main window of the station and as you can see it’s quite stunning. One can see bufflehead ducks, herring gulls, and many more simply by sitting at this prime location.

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If you want to learn more about the amazing things going on here on Nantucket at the UMB field station you can check it out on their Facebook page linked below. Until next time keep your eyes to the sky.

Link to the Nantucket Field Station: https://www.facebook.com/NantucketFieldStation

-Jonathan Dain