Alyssa J. Sargent

• Bachelor of Science
• PhD Student at University of Washington

Hummingbirds have two main foraging strategies: territoriality (defending a patch of flowers) and traplining (foraging over routine circuits of isolated patches). Species are often classified as employing one or the other. Not only have these strategies been inconsistently defined within the behavioral literature, but this simple framework also neg...

• Bespoke (custom-built) Raspberry Pi cameras are increasingly popular research tools in the fields of behavioral ecology and conservation, because of their comparative flexibility in programmable settings, ability to be paired with other sensors, and because they are typically cheaper than commercially built models. • Here, we describe a novel, Ra...

Nectar-feeding birds employ unique mechanisms to collect minute liquid rewards hidden within floral structures. In recent years, techniques developed to study drinking mechanisms in hummingbirds have prepared the groundwork for investigating nectar feeding across birds. In most avian nectarivores, fluid intake mechanisms are understudied or simply...

The formerly endangered Kirtland's warbler ( Setophaga kirtlandii ) is among a growing number of conservation‐reliant species that depend on active management to avoid reverting to endangered status. Because the Kirtland's warbler is a habitat specialist of young, even‐aged jack pine ( Pinus banksiana ), managers of the recovery effort stressed cre...

Most pollinators, with their small size and flight ability, are a challenge to study in the wild, yet their behavior is essential for understanding patterns of biodiversity. For example, hummingbirds play a significant role in their ecosystems—their movements from plant to plant across landscapes ultimately determines their potential as pollinators...

Background: Given that wildlife tags have recently become miniaturized enough to work with some of the world's smallest vertebrates, there is a newfound urgency for affordable, field-accessible biologging ethics studies. We designed a 3-hour time-budget experiment to investigate how radio-transmitter backpacks affect hummingbirds' behavior. Using a...

Automated radio telemetry systems (ARTS) have the potential to revolutionise our understanding of animal movement by providing a near‐continuous record of individual locations in the wild. However, localisation errors in ARTS data can be very high, especially in natural landscapes with complex vegetation structure and topography. This curtails the...

Automated radio telemetry systems (ARTS) have the potential to revolutionise our understanding of animal movement by providing a near-continuous record of individual locations in the wild. However, localisation error in data generated by ARTS can be very high, especially in natural landscapes with complex vegetation structure and topography. This c...

The approach of managing one habitat for one species has been criticized for its neglect of overall conservation of avian species richness. Nevertheless, a single vegetation type—young even-aged jack pine (Pinus banksiana)—has been planted extensively in northern Michigan, USA, to restore populations of a single species, the Kirtland's Warbler (Set...

Nectar‐feeding birds provide an excellent system in which to examine form‐function relationships over evolutionary time. There are many independent origins of nectarivory in birds, and nectar feeding is a lifestyle with many inherent biophysical constraints. We review the morphology and function of the feeding apparatus, the locomotor apparatus, an...