Dissertation Research: Using hummingbirds to test the link between bird and plant distributions in tropical montane rainforest

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In the tropics there are over 320 species of hummingbirds, with bills of different shapes and sizes. Some hummingbird species visit many species of flowers and others visit just a few. Along tropical mountainsides, most hummingbird species occur within a narrow range of elevations. The goal of this project is to understand environmental factors that prevent birds with such restricted ranges from living elsewhere. The hypothesis is that hummingbird ranges are restricted to the ranges of the species of flowering plants that they pollinate. Testing this hypothesis requires data on which plants are pollinated by which hummingbirds. By identifying pollen on bills of hummingbirds one can determine which flowering plants they rely on. Pollen will be identified from different hummingbird species found along a mountainside in southeastern Peru. To test the hypothesis, pollen data will be combined with data of the distributions of flowering plant species along the same mountainside. The broader impacts of this study include: 1) its importance in assessing whether species such as hummingbirds, which are potentially constrained by their flowering plant resources, will be able to persist in the fact of future climate change; 2) the production of educational outreach materials, including a hummingbird-flowering plant photo guide and three compact discs of recorded bird songs from the mountains of Peru; and 3) extensive training of thirteen future scientific researchers of diverse ethnic backgrounds in Neotropical ornithology and ecology.