Sapayoas are cool: a group of Cornell students including current senior Ben Van Doren and junior Sarah Djelski are getting some nice attention for their paper on the biology of the enigmatic Sapayoa, a little-known bird of Panama and northern South America that turns out to be the only representative of its group in the Americas. Ben, Sarah, and their colleagues spent a summer in the remote Darien region of Panama as part of a student-led Cornell Ivy Expedition sponsored by the Lab of Ornithology. Among other accomplishments, they documented the unusual nesting and breeding behavior of this species, including many findings completely new to science. You can read more about the study here, read their original research paper here (it is open-access and therefore free), and watch some of the videos that they archived in the Macaulay Library here.
