The seventh in a series of personal notes focusing on gratitude.
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Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
Since today’s traditional dinner is of turkey…here’s a letter that’s about birds (sort of).
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February 2, 2025
Dear Heather:
My most substantive interactions with you came in the spring of 1993, when, as a sophomore, I took your Animal Behavior course (Biology 204?).
It was a really fun class. I seem to recall that we caused fish to fight with their mirror images by getting them drunk. Did that really happen, or is that my brain filling in memory gaps in the most colorful way possible? In any case, the course’s fascinating material (including the titillating mating stuff) provided a strong affirmation that biology was the right major for me — an important decision at the time, and probably a good one, since, 30-plus years later, I now teach biology to undergraduate students of my own.
The course’s most lasting impact came from the labs devoted to Semi-Independent Projects. The basic idea was to give students some freedom to do a bit of authentic (i.e. non-cookbook, not-fully-prescribed) research within the context of a regular academic course. Such projects are more common these days (due in large part to the CURE movement), but they were quite rare in the 200-level biology courses of the early ‘90s.
Anyway, a few of us chose the option of a project on the seed-caching behavior of black-capped chickadees. I believe we mostly spent most of our time standing in the snow near an on-campus bird feeder, watching chickadees through binoculars and logging whether or not they immediately ate the seeds they obtained from the feeder. You pitched the project as one that might yield publishable results, and, indeed, our data showed a trend for which the p-value was less than 0.05. Specifically, we found that a chickadee was significantly less likely to eat a seed (and therefore more likely to cache it, presumably) in the presence of two or more “conspecifics” (a fancy term that I learned during the project).
My classmate Jeremy Fox and I were excited by the possibility of getting published, and so we went ahead and wrote a short paper, and you dutifully edited it and submitted it to a bird research journal — The Condor? The Auk? The Spotted Grouse? Alas, the journal rejected it, thus ending Jeremy’s and my brief ornithology careers.
Despite the non-triumphant outcome, this experience planted a viable seed of sorts. It was now conceivable to Jeremy and me that we — mere undergraduates, who up to that point had only read a handful of primary research articles — could contribute to the scientific literature ourselves. Sure enough, a couple of years later, Jeremy and I would turn our respective senior theses into our first peer-reviewed publications.
While you weren’t involved in those papers, your quiet encouragment of the chickadee manuscript surely paved the way for them and the many papers that Jeremy and I have each written since then.
Thank you, Heather, for this deeply impactful support of our maiden flight into the scientific research wilderness!
Greg Crowther ‘95
My Track Record 
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