Citizen Science on Campus/Birding continued . . .
In January 2023, a housing unit for purple martins with six nest boxes was purchased by the College of Sciences and the Department of Biological Sciences and installed on campus near the Liberal Arts building. Undergraduate students in the Biology 2 course help with maintaining the nest boxes and are responsible for collecting data on nesting dates, the number of eggs laid, and the number of fledglings that survive. At the end of the nesting season, this data will be submitted to the Purple Martin Conservation Association (PMCA) who has collected continent-wide data on purple martins since 1988.
A second UNO housing unit was donated in March 2023 by Blake Grisham at Texas Tech University. This housing unit is currently being used to collect data on the temperature and humidity of different housing types. Karenisha Jackson, an undergraduate Tolmas Scholar, recently presented the first year’s data at InnovateUNO. The data collected from the housing unit on the UNO campus will be combined with data from other parts of the southeastern U.S. and will be used to make recommendations on housing types for different areas in the purple martin range.
This initiative is also part of the UNO Birding initiative on campus, designed to stress the importance of urban areas like campuses that can provide habitat, nesting locations and refuge for residential and migrating birds.
