NMU student spent months studying Juncos

MARUQETTE– One Northern Michigan zoology student had an exciting opportunity recently to go out into the field and do some research.

Ishpeming native and NMU student Emily Bertucci spent ten weeks studying the mating patterns of the white–winged Juncos. Males of the species mate with one partner for life while females have more than one partner and Bertucci was trying to see if the males noticed or changed their mating pattern raising offspring that wasn’t theirs.

“It’s just, it was an incredible experience and it definitely, the project that I got to set up and it was fun to do and it was fun to see how it worked and how it didn’t work and how I had to move around within the project,” Bertucci said, “to kind of change things as we went, because that’s just what science is.”

Bertucci will present her research at a conference in New Orleans this January. She was able to do this thanks to the Research Experience for Undergraduates grant from North Dakota State University. Bertucci also says that if she could do it all over again, she wouldn’t change a thing.