While thick clouds of smoke crossed Los Angeles in early January, Allison Shultz opened a freezer and released a hiding place of virgin white pigeon feathers.
The ornithology curator of the Natural History Museum of the County of Los Angeles has placed feathered handles between two small screens and cut them with zipped links. She installed one of these house feathered filters on the roof of the museum’s exhibition park building, a few others in her surrounding gardens, another in her backyard Gardena.
While the smoke engulfed the city, precious evidence accumulated in the white beards of the feathers.
“It’s really weird to be a scientist who studies forest smoke,” said Shultz. “We do not want there to be major smoke events. But then, at the same time, we want the data to understand things. »»
Allison Shultz, ornithology curator at the Natural History Museum of the County of Los Angeles, holds bags of feathers which she placed on the museum roof during the Los Angeles forest fires. Researchers will use them to study the effects of forest fire smoke on birds.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Now stored in sealed plastic bags, soot plumes will help answer questions about how chronic smoke exposure affects birds and to which animals were exposed during Los Angeles fire storms.
This is part of a broader scientific effort to understand how an unprecedented disaster will modify the various ecosystems of the region, many of which were already highlighted by a changing climate.
“Most of the fires are made from a distance from human housing, so we therefore have a bias in what we know in terms of bird reaction and vegetation and nature in” natural areas “,” said Morgan Tingley, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology of the UCLA who collaborates with Shultz under study. “We know much less on how these same processes occur when humans strongly influence the environment.”
Their research team soon extracts the pollutants that have accumulated on the pigeon feathers. A machine of the Mineralogy department of the museum called Raman spectrometer will analyze the compounds, determining the quantity of carbon on feathers from burnt organic matter such as trees and shrubs and how from combustion and other urban sources.
Allison Shultz, ornithology curator at the Natural History Museum, shows drawers from households at the museum, where researchers study bird feathers to determine the effects of forest smoke on birds.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
They will seek other contaminants resulting from the fire of houses and vehicles, such as microplastics and heavy metals.
Shultz and his colleagues were developing these methods long before the fires in January burst. They planned to study the exhibition of birds with smoke during the season of forest fires typical in southern California, which traditionally culminates from August to October.
They did not expect the smoke in question to come so close to her house.
Tingley of the UCLA lives about five kilometers from the eastern flank of Palisades Fire. He took many notes on his observations of bird behavior while the fire was raging.
The yellow degion paruline is a migratory singer bird that passes its winters in Los Angeles. For two days, Tingley recorded a constant flow of them flying in a pattern that looked like their spring migration.
It was a behavior expected for a very mobile species, he said. We do not yet know how the species of resident birds of Los Angeles – some of which spend their whole life in the one kilometer area (less than a mile) – will face a conflagration in the middle of them.
The microplastic research assistant, Jessica Flores, demonstrates the Raman spectrometer, which is the machine that will be used to analyze bird feathers for carbon, at the Natural History Museum.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
At the Natural History Museum, Shultz is well positioned to compare birds of that time to those exposed to past pollutants. The Department of Ornithology is home to floor archives to the ceiling of carefully preserved bird specimens.
One recent morning, Shultz opened a wooden tray to reveal rows of house pinsons, a bird the size of a palm commonly found in Los Angeles.
Of the small leg of a hanging specimen a handwritten label bearing the year of his death: 1917. Shultz has slowly lifted it from the tray.
“You see how it is black, and it’s black,” she said, delicately pointing the cooked feathers of the bird with a gloved finger. More than a century later, fine particles of pollution still clung to its feathers, ending what was once a scarlet red breast with a marbled gray.
“We know that birds have been very sensitive to smoke for a long time. Think of the Canaries in the coal mine, right? Said Shultz. Cage birds were used as carbon monoxide detectors living at the end of the 19th century – thanks to their very effective respiratory systems, birds died of gas leaks long before human minors did it.
But there are many things that we do not know about how cumulative pollution affects these animals and on the impacts of a disaster like this year’s fires. Does carbon trapped in its beards affect the ability of a bird to regulate its own body temperature? What pollutants stick, and which are held? Many species take dust baths to clean – what if this dust is also full of contaminants?
Allison Shultz shows house pinson drawers at the museum, where researchers study bird feathers to determine the effects of forest smoke on birds.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
The dead birds found are often given to the museum, and Shultz has been prepared for an influx of new specimens while the fires raged. They did not come. Tingley also heard little bird mortality relationships.
Most species may have been able to escape smoke or minimize their exposure by reducing their activity during its peak and “we may have been lucky,” he said. “But these are questions we will have to keep trying to answer.”
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