SOARing Into Spring - the return of Stanford's Ornithology class!
Written by Maya Xu '25
Walking into my first day of ornithology in the spring of my freshman year, the only hopes I had were learning more about birds, maybe holding a bird, and finding a new community of bird people. I never imagined that in two short years, I’d be part of its teaching team. After my previous instructors graduated and the course wasn’t taught for a year, it felt so surreal when I stood at the front of a classroom with my fantastic co-instructors, ready to spread the bird love to a fresh crop BIO 121/221 students.
I fell in love with birds during high school, much later than some of my peers whom I’ve met in ecology. Starting in eleventh grade, I competed in my high school’s Science Olympiad for ornithology, right before COVID shut down the world , and learned to ID more than 150 North American birds in addition to basically doing a self-studied crash course on anything avian. I was always looking for ways to interact with nature in my own backyard, and being a part of Science Olympiad for ornithology started me on my path to becoming an eBird junkie, trying to ID and find as many birds in my county as humanly possible. While I’d already been interested in ecology, I completely fell in love with birds that summer, and I haven’t looked back since.
I’m majoring in biology at Stanford with a concentration in Ecology, Evolution and Environment. But I’m also completing an education minor and the Notation for Science Communication, which have helped me immensely towards my goals of becoming a science educator myself. And now I’m headed into my senior year at Stanford, working on an honors thesis studying West Coast raptors in Rodolfo Dirzo’s lab, and just a few short quarters away from teaching ornithology again.
Anatomy of a bird class
Our lead faculty, Rodolfo Dirzo, structured BIO 121/221 (Ornithology) as an upper division biology elective that takes place over the course of a ten-week quarter - a really short time to pack in lots of amazing bird facts! For the most part, the class was a survey of almost any field you could imagine within ornithology, from anatomy and physiology to conservation biology. And even though it’s housed under the Biology Department, we had students who came from all backgrounds, from undecided freshmen to masters students in management science and economics. There were 28 students in total, all excited from the very first day to dip their toes into the world of ornithology.
The whole Ornithology class at the Baylands for our first field trip! Photo courtesy of author.
With the wonderful guidance of Rodolfo, the class was run by myself and Ben Moran, a fifth year PhD student at Stanford, and by our resident bird expert, freshman Marty Freeland. We used the class slides and syllabus from previous teaching team and Dirzo Lab members Dr. Tyler McFadden and Dr. Lucas Pavan, as a jumping-off point for structuring the quarter. But one of the biggest changes that we wanted to make as a teaching team was creating more of a focus on active learning. With the class meeting two mornings a week for almost two hours of scheduled lecture time, we wanted to make sure our students could engage with the material and make meaningful memories through their own active participation. As an alum of two active learning-focused docent training programs - the EcoDocent program at the Palo Alto EcoCenter, and Jasper Ridge’s BIO 105A/B (Ecology and Natural History of Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve), I’m a huge fan of getting students off their screens and into nature.
Some of my most memorable contributions to our class activities definitely skewed a bit more on the silly side. Before our food and foraging day, I made a pit stop at Trader Joe’s for a bunch of bird-themed snacks like dried blueberries and sunflower seeds, then pitted students against each other with different types of ‘beaks’ (ex. syringes for hummingbirds, chopsticks for herons) to illustrate the specialized adaptations that different birds have for their respective food sources. And I don’t think any of us will forget ‘Bird Charades.’ A companion activity to the mating and social behavior class, we adapted a game of rock-paper-scissors to simulate the different types of bird breeding systems (genetic monogamy, social monogamy, and the two ‘harem style’ types of polygamy.) All of the students left that class giggling, but they definitely remembered what was taught in lecture that day. Seeing them all having fun with each other was one of my biggest hopes for the course - having fun with course material was the best way to not only engage students, but also spark more long term interest in birds and conservation.
But of course, the highlight of the class was our field trips - a kickoff birding expedition to the Palo Alto Baylands for a crash course on water birds, and a bird banding trip to Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve ('Ootchamin 'Ooyakma) with staff from the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory (SFBBO). Just like JRBP('O'O), SFBBO is a founding member of the NSF-funded San Francisco Bay Research Coordination Network for Student Opportunities in Avian Research (SOAR).
Banding together at Jasper Ridge
Armed with early morning energy, oranges and jam-filled Kringle, a kind of Estonian pastry that Ben brought, we all drove through the Jasper Ridge gates at 6am. After the initial scramble for mud-proof boots at the Sun Field Station, we walked down the Causeway Trail and met up with Dr. Katie LaBarbera, SOAR affiliate and Science Director for the SFBBO’s land bird program. Katie and another bander were already hard at work monitoring the mist nets they’d set up for birds every half hour, and taking measurements for the ones they’d been able to bring in. Sunlight was already starting to stream through the thick canopy of willows, oaks and other members of the riparian forest community as we slogged our way into the sticky mud to check the nets, dodging fallen branches and sneaky strands of poison oak.
We stayed with the SFBBO for about two hours, catching around a dozen birds. Katie enlisted a few students to help with note-taking, exposing them to the many different measurements that bird researchers glean from just a few short minutes with a bird. She also told us plenty of fun facts about each bird - I didn’t know myself that female Wilson’s warblers at Jasper Ridge often had small black caps like the males, exhibiting less sexual dimorphism than in other areas of California. And judging by how often it was mentioned in the post-trip reflections we asked students to write, that fact stuck with them too.
Everyone peppered Katie with all kinds of questions, and more than one student wrote on their post-trip reflection how amazed they were at how easily Katie was able to answer! “I learned so much from observing Katie’s bird-banding in action. The whole experience helped put the class content into context,” said Carolyn Ikeda ‘24. Having an expert in both bird field studies and ornithology was so special for all of us, and I’m so grateful we were able to have Katie with us.
The students receiving a bird-banding induction from Dr. Katie LaBarbera at Jasper Ridge. Photo courtesy of author.
LEFT: A stunning Wilson’s warbler caught from one of the Jasper Ridge mist nets, with a band on its leg just under Katie’s fingers! RIGHT: An adorable wrentit posed for the cameras before its release. Photos courtesy of author.
Another major highlight of the trip, and the highlight of spring quarter for many students, was when they got to release the birds. I remember the first bird I ever got to hold - a dark-eyed junco, whisper-soft and so much tinier than I’d expected for such a spunky little bird. There’s something so magical about coming up close and personal with the winged creatures who are so accessible for us to see, but usually flitter just out of reach. And looking at the pure joy and wonder on the students’ faces, their brilliant smiles as we took photos of them with their fleeting friends, made me feel like I was meeting a bird face-to-face for the first time, over and over again.
Students with a western flycatcher (left) and orange-crowned warbler (right) in their hands, ready for release! Photos courtesy of author.
We took the students on a bird walk across Jasper Ridge, encouraging them to search for any examples of bird behavior that they could link to the concepts we’d been discussing in class. It was incredible to see how they’d all progressed from our first Baylands birding trip, finding a huge range of species from California quail to ring-necked ducks, with all kinds of cool class-related observations from ‘pit-pit’ alarm calls to robins sporting their juvenal plumages, or the first full set of feathers that they grow before their adult plumages. “I loved watching the nuthatches hop around on the tree above us while we were at the banding table.They go completely upside down while they hop around the trunks of the trees. …In a wooded area, these quick little birds would take advantage of prey living on these vertical planes, where other animals might have difficulty,” wrote Nick Rodriguez ‘25.
When we got back to campus, everyone was tired and covered with plenty of willow fuzz from the riparian area’s shedding catkins. But all of the students, including the ones who’d looked a little frightened at the prospect of a 5am wakeup at the beginning of the quarter, completely agreed that banding day had lived up to the hype. For the rest of the quarter, they were even more engaged with the course material, and when we asked them to choose a topic for our ‘choose your own adventure’ lecture, more than half of them asked about common California birds and birding best practices. Our morning at Jasper Ridge had definitely left its mark, and I have no doubt that when the Stanford Birdwatching Club is back in action this fall, we’ll have plenty of new additions from our BIO 121/221 alums.
This summer I’ve been spending time researching for my senior thesis and going to bird-banding days with Katie and Julian Tattoni, an alum of the Dirzo lab and bird researcher extraordinaire. I’ve been at Jasper Ridge almost every week through the summer season, including a visit just a few days ago to cover the riparian area’s July transect. But even though it’s still a little while away, Marty and I are already starting to think about how to structure Ornithology next spring - sadly without Ben, who’ll be graduating before the course is taught again. We got fantastic feedback from our students throughout the quarter and from end-of-term course reviews, and one of the major hopes from almost everyone was that we’d be able to do more field trips. Here in the Bay Area, we’re so blessed to have so many incredible birding places right at our fingertips, so we’ll have some tough decisions to make on where to go next year. But one thing’s for sure - we’ll be back at Jasper Ridge with a whole new group of students, ready to bird and band as the sun comes up.
BIO 121/221’s 2024 teaching team - from left to right: Ben Moran (docent class of 2021), Marty Freeland (docent class of 2024), Maya Xu (docent class of 2022). Photo credit: Emily Chu
Written by Maya Xu '25
Maya is a current SOAR intern and member of the Dirzo Lab. You can read more about how the SOAR project supports undergraduates' exposure to avian biology, data-driven scientific inquiry, field experiences, and professional development here.
