A Hawk's Eye View

Mentoring, collaboration, and research 25 years in the making

by KELSEY STREMEL photography by KELSEY STREMEL & ERICA CLARK

It’s 3:32 p.m., and a half-mile plume of dust follows a white Dodge Ram truck along a white chalk road as it travels up and down weather-worn hills and gullies in a remote area on the grassy plains of western Kansas. Under the glaring Kansas sun, the truck comes to a stop. Fort Hays State University biological science graduate student Erica Clark climbs out, stretching to shake off stiffness from the long ride.

She pulls a worn backpack and the hard-sided case of a Phantom 4 drone from the pickup bed and prepares to launch. Within minutes, she’s sent the drone high into the big blue sky in search of the nest of an elusive Buteo regalis – the largest hawk on the western plains, and commonly known as the Ferruginous Hawk.

The ornithology research Erica and her advisors, Dr. Bill Stark and Dr. Medhavi Ambardar, are conducting has been in the making for more than 40 years. Her task is to observe and uncover insights into the behavior of the reclusive raptor that plays a critical role in the ecosystem of the high plains.

The recommendation of a friend played a major role in Erica’s decision to come to Fort Hays State. She’d always loved the outdoors and heard the beautiful university on the plains was home to the most supportive, innovative, and determined faculty in the field.

She knew after speaking with Stark that this would be a community where she could pursue her love of wildlife biology, gain skills and experience and, most importantly, build a network to support her future career in wildlife ecology.

Stark is renowned for his passion for empowering students to pull on their boots, roll up their sleeves, and build a career in conservation and environmental science through vigorous fieldwork and research opportunities.

He’s also a pioneer in the field of Unmanned Aerial System application, or in simpler words, the use of drones in industry.

“We value colleagues, collaboration, and it’s all about the students here at Fort Hays State,” Stark said.

“It’s a unique dynamic in our department. Here, tenured faculty are committed to mentoring and supporting junior faculty. Classes blend graduate students and undergraduate students, creating a think-tank for peer mentoring and problem-solving. The research is great, exciting, and interesting, but we are all here to inspire students,” Stark said. The research Erica is now conducting is the very project Stark came to work on as a new faculty member at FHSU before he discovered his love for ichthyology and herpetology (fish, reptiles, and amphibians). At the time, his mentor suggested the reclusive bird would be too difficult to study and, instead, there would be more support for him to focus on riparian ecology. As they say, the rest was history.

Over the years, though, Stark never gave up on his passion for the majestic Ferruginous Hawk. When a vibrant junior faculty member Dr. Medhavi Ambardar joined the department of biological sciences, he found the perfect academic partner to help carry on with the possible raptor research project that had long fascinated him. Ambardar works primarily with songbirds, but when Stark approached her and Erica with the idea, she was all in. Together, they developed and were awarded a $223,723 grant from the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks, and Tourism to research the relatively unknown bird.

“Raptors are special. They play an important role in the ecosystem, and they are a bird that people recognize and appreciate. They are majestic and regal but also reclusive. There’s so much we don’t know about them,” Ambardar said.

This elusive behavior is what makes the awe-inspiring bird of prey such an enigma to biologists and conservationists. Together, Stark, Ambardar, and Clark are on a mission to discover the status of the Ferruginous hawk and it’s nesting behavior.

The project began with Erica pouring over the journals, field notes, legal documents, and maps of Steve Roth, who conducted a similar study in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Not only has technology changed drastically in the last 40-plus years, but the logistical complexity of conducting research on private land would become one of the most significant challenges of the project.

In Roth’s time, when you wanted to conduct research, you went to the great outdoors and did it. Erica, though, had to start with the daunting task of locating and contacting the landowners and caretakers of the land that Roth documented as nesting sites.

Quickly becoming an adept negotiator, she built personal relationships and was able to secure the necessary permissions to conduct her research on about half of the initial 120 documented nesting locations.

Ferruginous hawks tend to nest in the same location generation after generation. Their nests are massive structures measuring up to 5-6 feet across and built of sticks, grasses, yucca stalks, and even bones collected from the prairie. What’s even more impressive is that these nests are often found 16 meters high and wedged into the face of a Kansas chalk bluff.

You’d think it would be easy to study such a large bird with such fascinating nesting habits, but the Ferruginous Hawk is exceptionally reclusive. Purposely avoiding the disruption of any human presence, it tends to nest in very remote areas of the prairie.

The next challenge for Erica was how to research such a reclusive bird without causing undue stress during such a critical time as nesting.

While the Ferruginous hawk will persistently avoid close contact with humans, it is remarkably tolerant of Unmanned Aerial Systems or drones. Stark, Ambardar, and Erica created a unique plan for using high-resolution cameras and drone technology to survey the nesting sites, film the hawks, and bring the data collected back to campus for analysis.

“It’s cool how much information you can get with the drone, and it’s so much less invasive for the birds,” Erica said. “If you fly ethically, it’s a better management and conservation tool than we have ever had access to before.” They sent the drone out on a flight path over nesting sites where it would take a 360-degree video of the location and bring back still images. Back at the lab, these videos and pictures could be analyzed for habitat and behavior data as well as used to create a Pix4D rendering.

“Everything Erica brings back is so exciting,” Ambardar said. “There is so much we don’t know.” This research will inform future understanding of hawk behavior and the ecological impact of humans on western grasslands.

So far, Erica has presented the findings of her research at the Kansas Ornithological Association’s annual meeting, the Kansas Natural Resource Conference, and the International Raptor Research Foundation Conference.

Erica is only in her first year of this work, and she knows there is no doubt more to be observed, evaluated, and chronicled about the lifecycle and behaviors of this raptor. The team is already preparing for the upcoming year and planning for winter and spring surveys of the nesting sites. “One of the best things about FHSU is that you get more – a lot more – interaction with your professors. And they care,” Erica said. “I came here because of Dr. Stark, and I’ve been so happy to work with Dr. Ambardar as well. She’s easy and accepting and helpful with any issue, whether it’s about research or life.” The collaborative research model in the Department of Biological Sciences ensures that Fort Hays State will continue to play a key role in understanding the ecology of the great plains and pioneering the use of drone technology in field research.