OUTREACH
The Clayton-Bush family, including Sonora and her brother Austin. Dale Clayton and Sarah Bush are faculty members at the School of Biological Sciences.
Footnotes from a Young Scientist
Letters from the
Galápagos
Islands
8
O
ur South American correspondent Sonora “Nora” Clayton happily embarked on an excursion of a lifetime in January of this year: the Galápagos Islands off the coast of mainland Ecuador. The middle-schooler was embedded in Clayton/Bush lab fieldwork (Dale Clayton and Sarah Bush also happen to be her parents.)
It was a first-hand view of research into parasites of birds, and her weekly, illustrated letters each began with the familiar ‘To whom it may concern.’ The project was followed by Utah school teachers and has now been archived. “This expedition’s purpose is to study avian vampire flies (Philornis downsi),” wrote Nora in the first letter before leaving Salt Lake City, “and how these flies affect finches and mockingbirds in the Galápagos Islands. So, we’ll pack spotting scopes for watching birds, a field microscope for identifying flies, nets, and banding equipment so that we can give each bird a unique colored bracelet for identification. Most of these supplies are [currently] in a pile on our basement floor.” It wasn’t an easy venture, not only because of the distance, but because of Covid-19. The entire team had to be tested
