Obsessed with the effects of danger on animal relationships in Amazonia, biologists pull at the thread of fear to unravel a rainforest mystery and explain a grand natural spectacle using trained hawks, lasers from space (ISS), network science, and old-school naturalism. This is raw field biology at its finest.
In 2022, Eliseo (Seo) Parra, a Ph.D. student at UCLA, headed research in the Madre De Dios region of the Peruvian Amazon. There, Seo traveled through the region to various field sites that had been affected differently by deforestation and used data collection methods which included falconry. The purpose of this research was to see how the type of forest affected the ability for small flock birds to communicate depending on the type of forest. The condition of the sites was determined by the level of selected logging. Once determined, the sites were split into three groups, ranging from heavily logged, lightly logged, and near pristine forest that had little-to-no logging.