Tracking The More Important Sex

Most songbird research focuses on singing males, suggesting that songbird population demography is "a man's world." However, as James Brown so eloquently stated, "... but it wouldn't be nothin', nothin' without a woman or a girl." Just as it doesn't matter how many singing males we count if they are all unpaired, so too can a migration study be poorly informative if we only track males while the females do something entirely different. We knew it would not be easy to find geomarked females a year later, which explains Gunnar's smile of relief when this female was caught today in Minnesota with geolocator still collecting data!