By Madeline Reinsel

Kaylynn Breland spent last summer break contending with cattle, thunderstorms and mountainous terrain. Trekking through Highland County, the Virginia Commonwealth University undergraduate student was braving the elements in order to better understand the continent’s smallest falcon: the American kestrel.

Breland, who is also a trip leader and student manager in VCU’s Outdoor Adventure Program, spent May and June studying the birds in Highland, which is west of the Shenandoah Valley on the West Virginia border. But what started as a simple job — nest monitoring and data entry — quickly turned into a fully fledged research project.

Male American kestrels are substantially smaller than females, and ornithologists assume that female chicks should require more food and effort from the parents. Breland wanted to find out if parents’ behavior toward nests with different sex distributions matched those predictions.

“What I was really interested in is what happens when you go from one extreme to another,” Breland said, “from five ‘easy’ chicks that are all males and require less food, to five female chicks, which require a much greater amount of food and effort.”

To do so, Breland used two types of cameras: One on a long pole, to look inside nest boxes and determine the number, sex and age of the chicks, and one mounted near nest boxes to monitor parental visits. She worked with Patricia Reum and John Spahr, two volunteer citizen scientists from the Virginia Society of Ornithology, who run the kestrel nest box program in Highland year-round.

“Kay has quite the organizational aptitude,” said Dan Albrecht-Mallinger, Breland’s research advisor and an instructor in the Center for Environmental Studies, which is part of VCU Life Sciences. “She knows how to work the calendar. She knows how to get people in place. She knows how to plan equipment.”

After returning from the field, Breland and other student volunteers spent the fall semester analyzing hundreds of hours of video footage. So far, she has found that nests laid earlier in the year take longer to hatch than nests laid later in the year. She has also found that male and female kestrel parents feed their hatchlings different prey and spend different amounts of time feeding their hatchlings. Breland hopes to answer her original question — whether kestrel parents treat male and female chicks differently — in future research.

Breland has received funding from VCU Rice Rivers Center’s fellowship in student mentorship, the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, the Internship Funding Program and the Virginia Society of Ornithology. She credits the Center for Environmental Studies for helping her pursue her interest in environmental studies and field research.

“The fact that our department offers opportunities to do these sorts of things and have these experiences, and then inspires you to find your own research that you’re passionate about, is really, really cool,” Breland said. “I feel like my whole time in college, my driving principle has just been that I’m really curious about everything. And I want to try everything, and I’ve really been able to do that here because of the support of our dedicated faculty.”

Breland offered additional insight about her life as an undergraduate researcher.

What led you to this research?

I knew that it would be a challenge, and I knew that it would push me in new directions and allow me to gain exposure to how science is actively done.

The way that Dan communicated science [in his data literacy course] really resonated with me, and I had been taking courses with him throughout my time in the environmental studies program. When I reached out about doing an independent study to gain more exposure to field work and explore future career opportunities, I was excited that he had been working on this project for a longer period of time.

I’ve always believed in the importance of trying new things, and this was a fully all-in experience that really allowed me to step into a potential career avenue and discover what I liked and didn’t like about it. I was also drawn to the fact that it was in a study system that was far from Richmond, and ultimately living in rural Highland County was an unforgettable and formative experience.

Beyond the research itself, what skills or connections have you developed?

Throughout my summer field season, I feel that I developed my problem-solving and project management skills.

Monitoring dozens of nests was a collaborative effort that warranted careful organization. Not only was I working with Dan, I was coordinating with citizen scientists, who had established these nest boxes for conservation purposes years prior, to complete all of the work that goes into accurate monitoring. I had to manage a field calendar, which had its own complexities, as kestrels asynchronously hatch. I established a protocol for watching hundreds of hours of video data and subsequently trained my peers in that protocol.

Over the course of the field season, I learned to trust my intuition, as most of my fieldwork was happening independently, and that was certainly challenging. I’m in the process of preparing a poster and talk to deliver at two different conferences, so presenting my results and communicating them in a confident and clear manner is something else that I’m taking away from this experience. 

What did you enjoy most about this project?

Though at times challenging, I truly enjoyed my field season living in Highland County. Being in a community with people who care so deeply about the conservation of living things was incredibly rewarding, and the landscape that surrounded me was so picturesque, reminding me daily of the value in the work that I was doing.

I also loved the autonomy that I had while still being well-supported by my mentors. I was fully responsible for gathering all of this data, and felt so fulfilled when other students also became involved in this team and shared my interest in this species. Seeing my peers develop as researchers using the data that I worked diligently to gather brings me a lot of satisfaction.

At this point in the process, I also feel a great sense of pride having seen my project through to the point of delivering my results in a meaningful way.

What advice do you have for other undergrads on how to get involved in research?

Be curious about everything, and try things without fear of failing. The worst that could happen is that someone tells you no.

Also, it’s OK to not know everything! Your mentors are there to support you, so just keep asking questions and use what you’re passionate about as a guide. Trust that you are so much more capable than you think, and be excited about the learning and growth that an undergraduate research experience will bring.