Penn Upward Bound high school students from West Philadelphia got a tour of the Penn Smart Aviary, GRASP Lab, and the Penn Vet Working Dog Center during a visit to Pennovation Works.
Eleven high school students stood around the 20-by-8-by-8-foot enclosure at the Penn Smart Aviary at Pennovation Works, focused on the dozen or so brown-headed cowbirds flitting from perch to perch and emitting high-pitched songs.
Biology professor Marc Schmidt and doctoral student Natalia Aponte Borges instructed the students—half of a group visiting that day from Penn Upward Bound—to tally the number of times they observed different behaviors: singing with spread wings, singing with wings down, preening, flying. The second task was to pick a single bird, identifiable by the pair of colored bands on the bird’s legs and follow the bird’s behaviors for three minutes.
