As a high school student, I began to become interested in the differences between the (then) two species of meadowlarks: Eastern and Western Meadowlark. This curiosity focused on a particular subspecies (separate population) of Eastern Meadowlarks that lived primarily in the SW United States and northern Mexico, then called Lilian's Meadowlark. During college, I transferred schools to start an honors thesis on the acoustic and genomic differences between the populations of meadowlarks. Using whole-genome sequences (all the DNA present in an individual) I was able to parse out the evolutionary relationships between the species. My collaborators and I found that the Lilian's population was evolutionarily distinct, and in its case, an older lineage than either Eastern or Western Meadowlark. Genetically, each species (Western, Eastern, and the Lilian's group) was distinct from one another and showed no evidence of interbreeding (hybridization). Additionally, acoustically, there was little overlap between song type among the populations, suggesting that song may be helping these populations diverge from one another.
This research led to a publication in the academic journal Ornithology, as well as acceptance by the North American Classification Committee (NACC) as a new species, now called Chihuahuan Meadowlark.
All this work was graciously funded by the Taylor Lab at Univ. Colorado Boulder and done under the guidance of both Dr. Scott Taylor and Dr. Erik Funk.
