By Science Director Dr. Katie LaBarbara
On February 24th, 2025, the Landbirds Program opened our banding site at Stanford’s Jasper Ridge ‘Ootchamin ‘Ooyakma for 2025. The JR’O’O site floods each winter and is re-opened each spring, with the goal of restarting banding before the Wilson’s Warblers arrive for breeding.
SFBBO started bird banding at JR’O’O in 2018 in collaboration with then-undergraduate Julian Tattoni, and students have remained a big part of our presence there: the JR’O’O site is part of our involvement in the Student Opportunities in Avian Research initiative to give undergraduates from local universities and community colleges experience in ornithological field work.
During this first 2025 banding day, undergraduates Maya Xu and Marty Freeland got the full field experience with Science Director Katie LaBarbera, hiking through deep mud underneath branches just starting to leaf out but already full of birdsong. In addition, this young male Oregon Junco (pictured below) was among the first birds of the year banded at the site.
Katie LaBarbara is a science director at SFBBO who specializes in landbird research and conservation. One of their primary responsibilities at SFBBO is managing the long-running bird banding program at Coyote Creek Field Station. Katie received a Ph.D. in Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley, studying life history variation in Dark-eyed Juncos in the Sierra Nevada mountains. They subsequently taught at UC Berkeley, then detoured to beautiful Minnesota to study tree frog communication before joining the team at SFBBO.