Growing up, Jenny Muñoz said she harbored a strong curiosity about nature and aspired to become a scientist.
While she never initially set out to become an ornithologist, today, she finds herself an ecologist studying cooperative behavior in bird species for her Ph.D. after working in the Amazon rainforest and the Andes in the tropics, including her home country of Colombia.
Colombia hosts the largest diversity of bird species – almost 2000, and growing up, Jenny said she was often surrounded by birds, animals, and nature at her family’s farm. Early in her career, she aimed to become an immunologist and started college aiming to do so. But an opportunity to help survey an endemic species came about, and she took it up.
The Red-bellied Grackle (Hypopyrrhus pyrohypogaster) is an endemic Colombian bird found in only a small part of Colombia, including where Jenny grew up.
Working on this project sparked her love for studying birds. She continued to do this throughout college, even forming a group with other students to study birds at their university, despite not having an ornithology professor. After a few summers of surveying birds, Jenny decided to quit studying immunology and focus on studying birds, spending long periods in the Amazon doing fieldwork. After graduating, she took on an opportunity to participate in a project understanding the distribution of tropical birds and after, a master's position at the University of British Columbia, where she studied cooperation between bird species. Jenny is currently finishing her Ph.D.
Her research is on cooperative ecology, focused on understanding how birds of multiple species cooperate in nature. Specifically, she looked at mixed species groups, from the Amazon to the high Andes, and has found that over ⅓ of the species studied cooperate with other species, deriving benefits from these interactions. For example, Jenny shared that cooperation with other species reduces an individual bird's chances of getting infected with parasites, and by cooperating with resident species migratory birds often obtain foraging benefits. These multi-species groups could also promote higher species diversity. She hopes to continue addressing questions related to species cooperation going forward.
Her research and work have also ignited a love for data and data analysis, leading her to an internship with the Canadian Wildlife Service, where she is doing a semester-long project to better understand how demographic parameters such as income, gender, or ethnicity impact access to greenspaces in Canada, working alongside Pacific Bird staff in Canada. Thus far, her work has revealed that 30% of those surveyed have barriers to accessing greenspaces. She’s now working to understand what these barriers are, and how we can address them through conservation work to ensure equitable access.
In her own words, during her free time she “enjoys any outdoor activity that challenges her” – from hiking difficult mountains to biking long distances and playing volleyball at the beach, in addition to painting and drawing. Her future goals include working for an organization that allows her to use data and collaborate with other researchers to answer large-scale questions that aim to understand and conserve biodiversity, protect birds, and address climate change.
