Ornithologist Dan Mennill holds a Rufous-and-white Wren, a
species he studies in Costa Rica. Photo by Dale Morris. Today,
our good friend Dan Mennill, an ornithologist at the University
of Windsor, is publishing a paper with Sandra Vehrencamp, a
scholar of animal communication and professor at Cornell
University, about the unusual duetting behaviors of a bird from
Costa Rica, the Rufous-and-white Wren. Dan first came to our
attention two years ago this month when he and fellow scientist
Geoff Hill reported finding Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in Florida.
(Hill wrote about their search in our February 2007 issue in the
article “The Other Guys.”) This week, we checked in with Dan
about his new paper, about what it’s like to work in Costa Rica,
and about the Ivory-bill. His answers appear below. — M.M. Where
do you and your students do field work in Costa Rica? What was
it like to work there? We work within Santa Rosa National Park,
in the Guanacaste Conservation Area of Costa Rica. I have been
working in this park