In late 2014, I along with a team of scientists from the department of Ornithology at the
American Museum of Natural History went to Vanuatu on a Constantine S. Niarchos Expedition.
Vanuatu is in the South Pacific, it's Northeast of Australia, there's 82-some islands in the
nation - these are relatively small islands that are mainly covered in tropical rainforest.
The major threats that the birds of Vanuatu face are agriculture, invasive species such
as rats, and human-induced climate-change.
So given these threats, there could be many changes to the bird diversity on Vanuatu since
early AMNH expeditions.
Some 90 years ago, the Museum participated in a biodiversity inventory of Vanuatu, collecting
birds from many of the islands, and doing a lot of the groundwork and baseline works
to have an understanding of what birds were found on each of the islands.
So one of our goals was to go back and re-survey these islands to see if we see any changes
in the diversity between a hundred years ago and today.
The team consisted of Mike Anderson, Bill Mauck, Lily Fatow, and myself.
I study island biogeography, and specifically birds that live in the South Pacific islands.
We're literally walking in the footsteps of the Whitney South Seas Expedition from almost
a hundred years ago.
Getting to re-survey some of these places both on the ground, in the field, and then
taking theories sort of to the next level um with all of the DNA work that we're able
to do now, was really something special.
For each bird that we catch, we record information on its natural history, and this includes
whether it's male or female, whether it's in breeding condition or not, and whether
it's molting.
We also collect a genetic sample.
For the birds that we cannot collect in our nets, we were also recording whether they
were present or not in the forest.
Vanuatu allows us to look at patterns of evolutionary history within a relatively small island archipelago.
But it fits into a really nice broad puzzle of the entire South Pacific.
Birds can colonize Vanuatu either from other islands, or they can come from the mainland
such as Australia.
And after they arrive in the archipelago they start to move in between islands, and when
they move in between islands they become isolated.
And this process can give rise to new bird diversity.
A goal of our expedition was to do a general inventory of the birds of Vanuatu, but we're
also very interested in the endemic birds of the islands.
And these are birds that are found nowhere else in the world, and some examples of this
are the Vanuatu kingfisher, the Vanuatu honeyeater, and the Vanuatu megapode.
One bird in particular is the Vanuatu whistler, in the genus Pachycephalae.
This is a bird that is part of a large complex of whistlers throughout the Pacific.
In places like Fiji, there are really dramatic plumage differences from one island to the
next.
But what's interesting is that we don't see that pattern in Vanuatu.
The whistlers there all look the same.
So this is sort of an opposite example of how birds can colonize islands and then seemingly
not really differentiate from one to the next.
The majority of specimens collected on this expedition will go to Mike's ongoing work
on the evolutionary history on the birds of the South Pacific.
We have some ideas about the overall species diversity on the islands and their relationship
with birds from different regions such as Papua New Guinea and Australia, but the timing
and the processes that led to the assembly of the birds of Vanuatu is still really poorly
known.
The specimens collected on this expedition will be used in ongoing genetic studies, studies
on the physical appearance of birds, and for reasons that we haven't even discovered yet.
We're hoping this DNA sequence data will clarify the evolutionary history of the birds of the
region.