CLARKSVILLE, TN – When Austin Peay State University Middle College student Devlin Westcott first connected with Dr. Stefan Woltmann through the Partners Engaged with Emerging Researchers (PEER) program, he had no idea that he would soon help lead a campus-wide conservation effort to potentially save hundreds of birds’ lives.
What started as an individual research project has come to include the Bird Alliance, a group of Middle College students who spend their mornings walking campus, documenting bird strikes, and contributing to Woltmann’s decade-long research initiative that has already proven successful in preventing bird deaths.
“I was just looking for a professor I could work with,” Westcott said. “I want to be a wildlife biologist in the future; I was big on wildlife, but not specifically birds. And now it’s snowballed into bringing in more people to the group and allowed me to meet a lot of new people and opened up a lot of different opportunities for me.”…