With Feathers on Her Cap
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Romero with a Florida Scrub-Jay in the field (Archbold Biological Station, Florida. All birds handled with the proper permits (2022) Photo courtesy of Faye Romero)
The Palawan Cockatoo and the Florida Scrub Jay are among the roughly 48,600 species on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. Their populations dwindle as habitat becomes the ground under housing developments, orchards, and other human pursuits.
Flocks of non-migratory birds like Florida Scrub Jays don’t seek new territories. Jays are social creatures, but their declining territories allow fewer social exchanges between neighboring flocks. As opportunities to refresh the gene pool collapse, inbreeding turns from a preventable risk into an inevitable reality.
Florida Scrub-Jays at Archbold Biological Station. You can see the colored bands around their legs, which helps us identify each bird individually (Photo by Reed Bowman)
Chronic Decline
“That is a chronic problem in species that are declining on the wild,” states Faye Romero, doctoral candidate in Evolution, Ecology, Genetics and Genomics at University of Rochester in New York. “As populations get smaller and are confined to an area, then they’re going to interact with each other.”
“Some common misconceptions about inbreeding start with reduced hatching success, lower birth weights of nestlings, and a smaller total number of offspring that each bird ends up having. In our field,” says Romero, “we call it the Extinction Vortex when individual animals show these negative consequences. It just keeps snowballing until they’re gone.”
Though her dissertation project involves birds in the wild, Romero performs all her computational work indoors. “I do genetics work at a computer.” She elaborates, “The way I describe it to folks is that I’m basically 23 and Me and Ancestry.com for wild populations of animals. A central goal of conservation genetics is to develop models, techniques and tools to diagnose the health of a population.”
Genetics research can deliver accurate predictions of whether a species will flourish or languish. “We can look at the genetics of a species and see whether it’s in trouble. They may seem to be doing okay numbers wise today, but the genetics are telling us that maybe in fifteen, twenty years, they might be doing worse,” Romero exclaims.
Ray of Hope
Field work (All birds handled with the proper permits (2022) Photo courtesy of Faye Romero)
Romero offers a ray of hope. “While we’re seeing their numbers continue to go down, I’m not pessimistic about the Florida Scrub Jay because we have lots of good scientists thinking about them.” People are naturally motivated to protect these birds that pack a high charm quotient. “They’re very charismatic and unique, and they’re one in only a handful of birds that are endemic to the U.S.”
Florida Scrub Jay are cousins of the American Crow in the Corvidae family. Like crows, these intelligent passerines or perching birds have sophisticated family structures. “They’re able to reproduce at one year old, but they are cooperative breeders. When they first reach maturity, they hang around the territory of their parents. They may do this for one or two years so their parents can raise successive generations.”
She will finish her PhD in a year. Her insights add to over 40 years of research by a long line of friends of the Florida Scrub Jay. Genomic work with this affable species will not end when Dr. Romero leaves Rochester, but hope abounds that her research will keep inspiring the public to take initiative in protecting bird habitat. Adults and youth have embarked on citizen science projects that complement Romero’s genomic work and lead to solutions we cannot yet imagine.
From Nature Lover to Birder to Scientist
Romero earned a B.S. in Molecular Environmental Biology from University of California at Berkeley before moving to Rochester, NY for graduate school. Asked her age, she answers, “late 20s.” She and younger sibling George were born to Art and Gena Romero after the couple immigrated from Batangas to Houston. Her husband, Nate, is an engineer she met while indulging in swing dancing, her No. 1 non-scientific passion.
She developed an interest in wildlife in middle school when her family left Houston to live beachside in Perth, Australia. While her life list spans 480 bird species, her interest in nature started as a generalist.
“I was generally interested in the outdoors and nature. Because all the birds in Australia are so unique and different, it’s kind of ironic that I only got into studying birds as an undergrad at UC Berkeley.”
A preternatural curiosity about birds led to hikes with birdwatching groups, banding at Braddock Bay Bird Observatory in Ontario, Canada, a visit to Costa Rica and its over 930 species of birds including her favorite, the Resplendent Quetzel, and a nonstop vigil of alerts on her phone’s eBird app of sightings of the rare Kirtland’s Warbler.
A lifer bird is a rare species that a birder expects to see only once in her lifetime. In May 2024 while on a family visit to the Palawan Islands, Romero saw two lifer birds. “The coolest thing I ever saw was either the Palawan Hornbill or the Stork-billed Kingfisher,” she gushes. “They are these amazingly unique birds.”
While she cannot name a “spark bird” that ignited her fascination with birds, the signature study where the former Berkeley undergraduate made her earliest mark in wildlife science involved hummingbirds—the world’s tiniest birds.
A Pioneering Hummingbird Study
A single male Anna’s Hummingbird museum specimen from a side-on perspective. This particular specimen was collected in October 2006 from the UC Berkeley campus in Berkeley, California (see the metadata on the specimen tag!). This specimen is from UC Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.
In 2019, Berkeley graduate student Nicholas Alexander embarked on his landmark study to examine whether the beaks of Anna’s Hummingbirds changed after 1940 when residents of Southern California and Baja California began hanging birdfeeders, which offered sugar dissolved in water as a new food source other than the plant nectar hummingbirds consumed in nature.
Around the beginning of his research, Alexander added Romero. “He happened to be a teaching assistant in a biology course I was in. He noticed that I was passionate about the class and that I liked to participate,” remembers Romero. “He told me I have this question you can help me answer by using museum specimens.” She was more than just intrigued.
Alexander posited that by comparing the beaks of Anna’s Hummingbird specimens (known as study skins) from mid-1800s to1940 with those that lived after that year, they would observe structural (taxonomical) changes to more easily access the tiny holes of backyard hummingbird feeders.
While assisting Alexander in comparing pre-1940 study skins with post-1940 ones, she observed distinct differences in bill taxonomy. These adaptations became commonplace among Anna’s Hummingbirds. “We still see birds that lived in higher density of feeders had bills that are longer and more tapered than those that didn’t.”
Thermal image of a perched Anna’s Hummingbird. This shows the bird releasing heat through its bill while perched (note the Celsius temperature scale on the right-hand side… the warmer the color, the hotter the temperature). This image is from Don Powers’ lab at George Fox University.
Natural Selection
Filipino Darwinists will note similarities between the Alexander study and the natural selection theory of their hero. Charles Darwin made comparisons of the beaks of a single species of finch that branched out into four distinct species over the course of two million years after its migration from South America to isolated islands of the Galapagos.
A simple schematic displaying one of the results from our hummingbird study (Alexandre, Romero, & Simon et al. 2025, Global Change Biology). We found that Anna’s Hummingbird bills were thinner and more tapered in locations with more artificial feeders.
It is myopic to dismiss Alexander and Romero’s work as a modern replication of 19th century findings. Their accomplishment has nothing to do with an existing body of knowledge but advances the new field of Urban Evolution, which focuses on survival of species under human-imposed stress.
Romero would love to conduct similar studies in the Philippines. “With seven thousand plus islands, the Philippines must be one of the top countries with the most endemic species on Earth,” she declares. “There are amazing opportunities for scientists to learn about evolution and conservation.”
And Romero has good news if you worry that your neighborhood hummingbirds are suffering from a steady diet of nutrition-free sugar water from your feeder. “I like to remind people that regardless of how frequently hummingbirds visit a bird feeder, a majority of their diet is still flower nectar.” She adds, “There are studies that show that if given an abundance of flowers or a feeder, the hummingbird will go for the flower.”
Lessons learned from efforts to save the Florida Scrub Jay could help arrest the decline of critically endangered species like the Palawan Cockatoo.
Faye Romero has coding talent and patience to decipher genome sequences longer than a small intestine (which is four times longer than your large intestine). And she swing dances! As to whether evolution endowed her with the one talent that unites Filipinos everywhere, she proclaims, “Yes, I like to sing.”
When she’s handed the karaoke mic, “You know who I’m obsessed with right now? Olivia Rodrigo. Her music is great and she has great karaoke songs that are fun to sing. Driver’s License is a classic.”
Anthony Maddela is a staff correspondent of Positively Filipino and a member of the Board of Santa Monica Bay Audubon Society.
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