Ohio birders:

Tom Bartlett was able to band the Kelleys' Island kingbird last December, and he took a few feathers while the bird was in-hand. The feathers were transferred here to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and we have been working on them in the lab. We've made some progress, but we don't have a final answer yet.

The first step was to sequence part of the bird's mitochondrial DNA, which will tell us who "mom" was (mitochondrial DNA is inherited from mom through the egg). But, we also needed to have material from Western, Couch's, Tropical, and other possible parental species to compare it to. Sometimes you can just grab sequences from a global database called GenBank; in the case of this genus of kingbirds, there wasn't much available, so we had to borrow tissue samples from other natural history museums. 

I can say that this bird's mother was not a Western Kingbird. It's mother was either a Couch's or a Tropical, but it doesn't exactly match the samples that we have. We are currently borrowing a few more Couch's and Tropical samples to finish this piece up.  Our next step is to sequence some nuclear DNA to figure out who dad was. This is in progress, and I'll report back once we have an answer. 

Andy
--
Andy Jones, Ph.D.
Director of Science
William A. and Nancy R. Klamm Endowed Chair of Ornithology, 
     and Head of Department of Ornithology
Cleveland Museum of Natural History
1 Wade Oval Drive, University Circle
Cleveland, OH 44106

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