Alpine Bird Research

Dondena area in Mont Avic Natural Park  And we are back to the mountains! My colleague and I had a two days fieldwork in Mont Avic Natural Park: our goal was to find a suitable site for placing traps and to give it a try in catching some Apine Choughs. Since it had snowed we knew that they were frequenting lower altitudes and therefore we thought to place both mistnets and clapnets around 1600 masl; unfortunately snow melting had left lots of grasslands patches free from snow and therefore we found the choughs around 2000 masl, foraging on grasslands and shrubs (especially on Juniper). We used the first day trying to understand how to be successfull with the captures and making some attempts with the clapnets but even if they foraged in the area where our traps were present, they seemed not to be attracted by the baits (raisin, bread and apple like always).  So the first day ended  without captures and samples, but with frozen feet.  On the second day we placed our f

During the summer we managed in collecting a good amount of data concerning grasshopper abundance distribution and Alpine Chough occurrence. Unfortunately catching them was the most difficult part🐤: for this reason we decided to make a greater effort trying to capture some individuals during the ongoing autumn and next winter. As usual, the aim is to ring them and to obtain faeces and feathers for the analysis,  but since one of the study's objectives is to know the population movements, we would like to involve tourists adding a citizen science part to the project: therefore we ask (to everyone going for a walk in Mont Avic or Cervinia) for any news about spotted Alpine Choughs with rings. Here it is the flier that we are going to hand out soon!

Cristina Vallino PhD student Departement of Life Sciences and Systems Biology University of Turin e-mail: crisval91@live.it Skype: crisval91@live.it ResearchGate:  https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Cristina_Vallino twitter:  https://twitter.com/CristinaVallino P roject:  Climate change, phenology of reproduction and resource availability in alpine birds The study is carried out in two areas with different levels of anthropization. OBJECTIVE 1: to understand the relationships between food availability and Alpine Chough distribution assessing the presence or absence of phenological mismatch (potentially caused by climate change) between Alpine Chough's key-prey during the reproduction, grasshoppers, and the corvid. METHODS: A. altitudinal transects to know the spatio-temporal distribution of grasshoppers    B. telemetry an direct ob servations of colour ringed individuals to understand the habitat use C. isotope analysis and  barcoding on feathers and faeces t