Where have all the bluebirds gone?

Biology professor Sharon Lynn (left) and Emily Elderbrock at a Bluebird box on Friendsville Road in Wooster, Ohio.

Emily Elderbrock reaches into a small box mounted on a post beside an open field and gently lifts out a newborn eastern bluebird. With its almost translucent skin, the tiny nestling seems as fragile as soap bubble, but Elderbrock handles it confidently. As the bird’s mother looks down with concern from a nearby telephone wire, the junior biology major measures its wings and legs, weighs it, and returns it to the nest.

Elderbrock will return to this nest box — and dozens of others in a three-county area —every three days to repeat her measurements. In about two weeks, the bird will be mature enough for her to band. Finally, when it is fully fledged, Elderbrock will take two feather samples, one from each side, and measure their growth bars, looking for evidence of correlations between nutrition, environmental stress, and growth rates.

It’s all part of a summer research project sponsored by the college’s Environmental Analysis and Action program. Working closely with Sharon Lynn, an assistant professor of biology at the college, Elderbrock is contributing to a study of eastern bluebirds’ breeding behavior and reproductive success in Northeast Ohio. Nationally, according to researchers at Cornell University, the species’ population has declined by more than 80 percent in the past 40 years.

“The eastern bluebird is a cavity-nesting songbird that has suffered population declines in this region as a consequence of increasing development and competition from invasive species,” Lynn says. “The overarching goal of this work is to understand the impact of environmental perturbations on [their] stress responsiveness and reproductive physiology and behavior.”

“Development takes down lots of old trees, the kind where cavities are most plentiful,” Elderbrock explains. It also brings the bluebirds into more contact with predators like cats and house sparrows.

For Elderbrock, who knew she wanted to major in biology when she arrived at Wooster two years ago, the fieldwork she’s doing this summer is her first experience with research outside the more formal structure of classes and labs. She’s savoring the differences.

“This is much more hands-on and more open-ended than a lab,” she says of her work with Lynn. “From one day to the next, you’re not sure what you will find.”