[ad_1]
As clouds of smoke rolled over Los Angeles in early January, Alison Schultz opened the freezer and removed the stash of the pristine white pigeon feathers.
Ornithology curators at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History placed a handful of feathers between two small screens and clipped them along with a zip ties. She installed one of these homemade feather filters on the roof of the museum’s exhibition park building.
As smoke enveloped the city, valuable evidence accumulated in the once white bars of feathers.
“It’s really strange to be a scientist studying wildfire smoke,” Schultz said. “We don’t want to have a big smoke event, but at the same time we want the data to understand things.”
Allison Schultz, ornithology curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, holds a feather bag placed on the museum’s roof during a Los Angeles wildfire. Researchers will use them to study the effects of wildfire smoke on birds.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
Suu Chee Plooms, currently stored in sealed plastic bags, can help answer questions about how chronic smoke exposure affects birds and what the animals were exposed to during the LA fire.
This is part of a broader scientific effort to understand how unprecedented extent disasters can change the different ecosystems of the region, many of which have already been highlighted by climate change.
“Most fire ecology is done quite remotely from human habitats, so there is bias in what we know in terms of how nature reacts to birds and vegetation in the ‘natural areas’ of quotes,” says Morgan Tinley, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, who works with Schultz in the study. “We know that there is much less about how those same processes occur when humans are very strongly influenced by the environment.”
Their research team will quickly extract pollutants accumulated in pigeon feathers. The machines in the museum’s mineralogy department are called Raman spectrometers. The compounds are analyzed to determine the amount of carbon in the feathers born from the burnt organic matter in the feathers, and how much they come from burning and other urban sources.
Alison Schultz, a curator of ornithology at the Museum of Natural History, shows the drawers of house finches at a museum where researchers study bird feathers to determine the effectiveness of bird smoke.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
They look for other contaminants that arise from burning homes and vehicles, such as microplastics and heavy metals.
Shultz and her colleagues were in the process of developing these methods before the January fire broke out. They expected to study smoke exposure during the typical wildfire season in Southern California.
They didn’t expect the smoke in question to be very close to the house.
Tingley at UCLA is about three miles away from the eastern side of the Palisades Fire. He took abundant notes on observing bird behavior as the fire became enraged.
The yellow-lamped warbler is a migratory bird that spends winter in Los Angeles. For two days, Tinley recorded a constant stream flying in a pattern that looked like a spring migration.
It was the expected behavior of the highly mobile species, he said. Some of the LA residents’ bird species (some of which do not yet know how to spend their lives within an area of a kilometer (less than a mile) deal with a huge fire in the middle.
Microplastics Research Assistant Jessica Flores shows the Raman spectrometer, a machine used to analyze carbon bird feathers at the Museum of Natural History.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
At the Natural History Museum, Schultz is suitable for comparing birds from this era with birds exposed to past contaminants. The Faculty of Ornithology has floor-to-ceiling archives of carefully preserved bird specimens.
On a recent morning, Schultz opened a wooden tray to reveal a row of finches in the house, a palm-sized bird that is often found in Los Angeles.
From the typical legs of one specimen, a handwritten tag depicting the year of its death was hung: 1917. Schultz gently lifted it out of the tray.
“You know this is black. This is black,” she said. More than a century later, fine particles of contamination still cling to their feathers, dulling their once scarred red breasts to spotted gray.
“We know that birds are extremely sensitive to smoke for a long time. Think about canaries in coal mines, right?” Schultz said. The caged birds have been used as carbon monoxide detectors since the late 19th century. Thanks to its highly efficient respiratory system, the birds died of gas leaks long before human miners did.
But there’s not much to be known about how cumulative pollution affects these animals, and how it will affect catastrophes like this year’s fire. Does carbon trapped in that barb affect a bird’s ability to regulate its own body temperature? Which contaminants stick and which molt? Many species get dusty and clean themselves – what if that dust is filled with contaminants?
Allison Schultz shows the drawers of the house’s finches at a museum where researchers study bird feathers to determine the effectiveness of bird smoke.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
Dead birds were often donated to museums, and Schultz was supported by the influx of new specimens as the fire intensified. They didn’t come. Tinley also hears few reports of bird mortality.
Most species could have escaped smoke and minimized exposure by reducing activity during their peak, and “we could have been lucky,” he said. “But these are questions that we have to keep trying to answer.”
[ad_2]Source link
