Hughes Mentor:  Andre Dhondt

Department: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

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Meet a Cornell Researcher! Andre Dhondt

André Dhondt is the Director of the Bird Populations Unit at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. His current research interests focus on the House Finch (Carpodacus mexicanus) and population regulation in relation to the parasitic bacteria Mycoplasma gallisepticum, which causes conjunctivitis,. However, this project was not planned - it was a case of being in the right place at the right time. Conjunctivitis was first discovered in House Finches in 1994, the same year Dhondt started working at Cornell. He decided it was an opportunity to study a new situation and its effects on population dynamics. Learning more about this disease was extremely important, as it could pose a major threat to the avifauna of the continent. To gain a better understanding of this disease, the House Finch Disease Survey was established. The House Finch Disease Survey utilizes citizen science, which is becoming a widely used tool and is gaining popularity with the public, as it introduces the general public to the world of science and data collection. In 2000, the project received funding from NIH/NSF for five years, in order to determine the nature of the epidemic. In 2005, Dhondt and his team became the only project to receive funding a second time to further investigate the nature of the epidemic. Since 1994, Dhondt and his group have published 45 papers on the Mycoplasma epidemic.

André Dhondt has not always been a student of epidemiology. However, population regulation has always been an interest. While an undergraduate at Gent State University in Belgium, Dhondt studied population regulation in Great Tits (Parus major) and the importance of territorial behavior and density dependant effects. It was a project that he also took to graduate school for his doctorate.

After graduate school, Dhondt became involved in the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. Projects he worked on included working with the department of conservation in Madagascar, and working with applied entomology in Western Somalia. While in Western Somalia, he worked on the impacts of the Rhinoceros Beetle. The Rhinoceros Beetle is an introduced pest to the area that has devastating effects on crops. After working in Africa, André got a position at Antwerp University, in Belgium, where he stayed for 20 years before moving to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. When asked why he came to Cornell, he simply replied that it was something new, and different. And Cornell has benefited from his desire to try something different. It’s important way to live, always ready to try something new; you never know the places it can take you.

Working with Professor André Dhondt at the Lab of Ornithology

Remember when your little sister came to visit you last weekend? On Monday morning, when you were taking her to the airport the strangest thing happened.

As you take the turn towards the terminal of Ithaca Tompkins Regional Airport and head towards short term parking, you see someone crouched in the grass looking through what seems to be a small, camouflaged telescope. The person also has a pair of fancy binoculars around her neck, and is rapidly taking notes. Alarmed, you park the car, tell your sister to wait for you, and run to the nearest security guard, glaring back at the spy sitting in plain view. To your relief, you find that she is a Cornell student who works at the Lab of Ornithology. The guard explains that she is doing a project on house finches and is looking at how often they visit their nests. Giggling to yourself, you tell your sister it’s okay and go into the airport with her.

Meanwhile, I continue to write down observations for an hour and a half, sitting as still as possible, listening carefully for house finch calls. Later, someone else will notice me diving into bushes with a metal rod. What they don’t know, is that the metal rod has a mirror on the end of it, and that I’m actually counting the number of young in a nest that’s buried far into some arborvitae.

This summer was my first experience with field work. I was under the guidance of Professor André Dhondt and Sarah Goodwin, who are part of the House Finch Disease Survey and study, among many other things, the impacts of a disease caused by the bacterium Mycoplasma gallisepticum on house finches. Professor Dhondt uses an amazing system to study the spread of this epidemic, asking people all over the country to record and send observations about the house finches at their bird feeders. The disease causes an inflammation of the eye known as conjunctivitis, which is relatively easy to detect visually, even from a distance. During the summer, however, the birds rarely show clinical signs, so eye swabs and blood tests are needed to determine their health. This assumes that the birds can be trapped, which proved to be quite a challenge.

As part of my original training, Sarah Goodwin and Melanie Driscoll taught me how to trap birds using a mist net. This is a very fine black net, about five meters long and 3 meters high, attached to long, metal poles that are fixed into the ground in front of the nest. This method works for many birds that do not see the net, fly right in and get stuck. House finches, however, seem to be quite clever and refuse to be trapped. We devised a modified version of this classic trap, calling it the “moving mist net”, in which two people held the poles and walked with them slowly and quietly towards the nest, while a third person scared the bird from the opposite direction, making it fly off too quickly to notice the net. This worked well a few times, but we were often disappointed when the net-bearers scared the bird before the designated “scarer”. After trying cage-type traps around feeders and on the nests themselves, and failing to catch any birds, we gave up, and I began working on the provisioning study that was unrelated to the disease.

Although the results I obtained were not conclusive, the process of designing and carrying out my own project was fascinating. I was very diligent in recording observations, sometimes having to be at a nest at 6am. I also learned how to use many other techniques and tools that did not apply directly to my project, such as using temperature sensors called I-Buttons to monitor incubation patterns or banding nestlings and reading band combinations of adult birds. Most importantly, I learned to be more independent and to think creatively about obstacles that I encounter in my work. I am very thankful for the experience I was offered in Professor Dhondt’s lab through the Hughes Scholars Program.