UH Hilo alumna, conservation biologist Joanna Wu studies survival rates of North American songbirds

Joanna Wu is researching which female songbirds live shorter lives than male counterparts and what it means for bird conservation. She says UH Hilo gave her the foundation to be the scientist she is today.

---

By Sophia Kim-O’Sullivan.

Conservation biologist Joanna Wu, an alumna of the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, is bringing a unique lens to the world of ornithology, focusing research on the often-ignored plight of female birds. In her current research as a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles, she is analyzing the survival rates of North American songbirds to better understand why male birds tend to have a longer lifespan than female birds.

“I went back to school because I was really compelled by this question of, ‘What’s the deal with female birds? What else do we not know?'” she says.

Now she’s making her own flight path into the study of female wild birds and their importance to conservation work.

From UC Berkeley to UH Hilo

Wu grew up from age 11 in Mountain View, California, and fondly remembers exploring the surrounding nature with her father, who often took her camping and hiking. She chose to stay in the Bay Area for college, doing her undergraduate studies at University of California, Berkeley, from 2005 to 2009.

It was at UC Berkeley that she first developed an interest in birds. In 2007, she was hired as a field assistant for UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. She was primarily interested in this position because the field work meant time spent outdoors. “I took [the job] because I liked camping,” she says.

That field work entailed catching and documenting birds to compare to geographical information collected from 1904 to 1940. Through this comparison, scientists hoped to better understand the impact of stressors like climate change on California animal species. “I happened to stumble into something that would turn into my passion for the rest of my life, which is ornithology,” Wu says.

She spent several field seasons studying birds in ecosystems throughout the California coast and in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. After graduating summa cum laude with her bachelor of arts in biology, she was ready for a change of environment. “I wanted to understand different environmental issues since they’re so tied to where you’re located,” Wu says.

So she came to UH Hilo for her graduate studies, where she got her start as an ornithologist on Hawaiʻi Island. She says she chose the university in part because of Hawaiʻi’s endemic native birds.

“There’s a unique problem with Hawaiʻi, of course, with avian conservation,” she says in reference to the multitude of extinct and endangered endemic species. “So I felt like it would be a good place to go and learn about that, and I’m really glad I did.”

As a graduate student in UH Hilo’s tropical conservation biology and environmental science program, Wu studied the ʻōmaʻo, an endemic species of thrush.

Her thesis advisors were UH Hilo biologist Patrick Hart, founder of UH Hilo’s Listening Observatory for Hawaiian Ecosystems, commonly called LOHE Lab, where scientists and students research the ecology and conservation of native Hawaiian forests and birds, and affiliate faculty Donna Delparte, an associate professor of geosciences at Idaho State University.

“My two primary advisors were really supportive and just great advisors,” says Wu. “They helped me when I needed help but otherwise helped me learn on my own.”

For her master’s thesis, Wu tracked ʻōmaʻo movements in comparison to the introduced warbling white-eye. She used this data to study whether the warbling white eye was helping to fill a gap in seed dispersal in kīpuka, environments of lush vegetation surrounded by young lava flows.

The endurance of kīpuka is threatened by the loss of native birds, with ʻōmaʻo being one of the few native seed dispersers left after the ʻalalā or Hawaiian crow went extinct in the wild. Wu observes that this research, “set a really critical foundation since my masters was the first project I built from the ground up.”

In addition to her work with ʻōmaʻo, while at UH Hilo Wu also helped create the Tropical Conservation Biology and Environmental Science Symposium, an annual event where grad students present their research. The 14th Annual TCBES Symposium was conducted earlier this year.

Wu was also a teaching assistant for several statistics courses at UH Hilo. “I enjoyed working with the professor and the undergrads. That’s given me more confidence and a building block to be able to TA now in my PhD as well,” she says.

Reflecting on her time at UH Hilo, Wu says the university was an important part of her journey, a “great foundation” for her current work and personal development. “I certainly found adequate support academically; I learned to be a scientist there.”

Current research: A focus on female wild birds and their importance to conservation work

After graduating from UH Hilo in 2012, Wu worked as a staff biologist for The Institute for Bird Populations in California, doing work related to the conservation of the endangered Sierra Nevada great gray owl.

In 2016, she switched over to working for the National Audubon Society, a non-profit established in 1905 dedicated to the conservation of birds. At Audubon, she worked in public communication and outreach around avian conservation. It was through this work that she began discussing with four colleagues how amateur bird-watchers often overlooked female birds.

“It’s not intentional or malicious or anything, but female birds are harder to identify,” Wu says. Female birds tend to have duller plumage, which can make them harder to tell apart in comparison to male birds that have more distinguishing features. Still, in the minds of Wu and her colleagues this implicit bias felt unfair.

So, to “promote female birds in their own right,” in 2019 Wu and her colleagues started The Galbatross Project to “spread awareness to the public about female birds.”

She soon realized that birdwatching hobbyists weren’t the only ones failing to pay attention to female birds. Scientists were also failing to focus on female birds in their studies. She notes her own omission of female birds in her prior research. “I wasn’t even considering sexes when I did my own master’s project. It’s a learning experience and now I know how important it is,” she says.

For Wu, female birds could be vitally important to understanding and countering the impact of stressors like land use change, habitat loss, malaria, and climate change on bird populations. Female birds are necessary for reproduction, so without them, conservation isn’t possible. “If we’re not studying females we might be missing key pieces of biology that’s required for species persistence in these challenging times,” she says.

Realizing the importance of closing these gaps in knowledge, she decided to start doing more research on female birds and in 2021 started her doctoral research at UCLA where she is studying which female North American songbirds live shorter lives than males and what this means for bird conservation. For Wu, continuing to explore these questions is an exciting prospect. “Right now I’m really passionate about female birds and I’m hoping that can be a part of my future career,” she says.

Presentation

Watch a presentation by Wu given in 2023 to the Connecticut Audubon Society, “The Most Overlooked Birds in North America: Females.”

“Make your passion your work”

Wu recognizes that finding her way wasn’t always easy. After graduation from the UH Hilo program, she applied for around seventy to a hundred positions and was rejected from most of them. She advises future students to not take rejections personally. “Don’t be discouraged, your persistence will pay off.”

She also notes how important it is to pursue what interests you. “Make your passion your work and then it won’t feel like work,” she says.

Wu still continues to nourish her love of camping, the passion that led her into ornithology.

“I have a daughter that I enjoy camping and hiking with. And, of course, I’m trying to teach her about all the birds and plants as we go outside. I’m trying to pass on that passion to her.”

---

Story by Sophia Kim-O’Sullivan, a graduate student in library science and information at UH Mānoa.