Sparrow video files

For the past four years, LSU has been involved in a court case with PETA, fighting to protect research materials that I am still in the process of analyzing. PETA had requested these materials – specifically, video files of sparrows during behavior trials in the lab – through an open records request. These videos were to be the focus of an NSF CAREER grant I recently received, which is why they had not been shared publicly. But in June 2024, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that the current state legislation does not protect these videos from open records requests. Therefore, in the spirit of transparency, and to give them some context, I am posting the videos here on my website for anyone to access.

 These are videos from 3 separate projects that constitute over 600 hours of video files. There are a couple cases where birds escaped from cages and had to be recaptured, or when video cameras accidentally didn't record, or when a husbandry person walked in during the middle of a trial, but science is done by human beings and not everything goes perfectly 100% of the time. As you can see from these hundreds of hours of video, most of the time the trials go smoothly.

If you are a scientist interested in analyzing any data from these videos, I only ask that you think about including me and my lab members as collaborators in your project. We spent a lot of time, effort, and money collecting these raw data and would appreciate being included in any research that comes out of them. Similarly, if you use them for any commercial purposes, we would appreciate being informed and potentially included in some way.

As of July 2024, our husbandry conditions are as follows for birds in the lab:

  • They are exposed to a light cycle similar to what they experienced at the time of capture.

  • They are usually singly housed for projects but occasionally they are housed in pairs when the project allows for it.

  • They can hear each other (and they are very chatty!) but they can't see each other.

  • They get as much mixed seed, grit (to help with digestion), and vitamin-enriched food pellets as they can eat.

  • They always have access to water.

  • They have 3 different perches (a plastic perch, a branch of manzanita wood, and a flexible rubber perch).

  • They have a dish of sand they can use for dust bathing.

  • They have a fake pine branch that they can use as another perch and as a hide.

    • When I first started at LSU, we did not use the rubber perch or the pine branch, but over time I have introduced these as additional enrichments, and the sparrows seem to enjoy bouncing on the rubber perch and hiding behind the pine branch.

  • When sparrows undergo novel object and novel food trials, we have to take out their sand dishes because they put food in them, and we used to take out the manzanita branches during trials as well.

During novel object and novel food trials, we take food out 30 minutes before the lights go out in the bird room and put it back 30 minutes after lights come on. We have verified that they don't eat at night, so this is not a very long fast, and we weigh birds each week to make sure they don't lose too much weight. They are housed in an animal facility at LSU and cared for by professional husbandry staff, not by researchers in my lab. They are also checked regularly by veterinarians, and if animals do not seem like they are doing well (e.g., they are losing too much weight, or their feathers are dirty or unkempt), they are humanely euthanized using an overdose of anesthesia. We are not allowed to release them back into the wild after experiments are done because they are a non-native species in the state of Louisiana and have negative impacts on native birds like purple martins and Eastern bluebirds, who they compete with (and sometimes kill) for nest sites.