On a crisp fall morning, Laurel Westcott Ph.D. '22 walks the grounds of the Oregon Zoo, stopping outside the snowy owl habitat. With a few taps on her tablet, she logs stationary, alert and on the ground for Banff, one of her favorite animals. Her observations feed into a tracking app that collects snapshots of the owl's behavior over time. It's one part of her job that also finds her in the zoo's "poop lab," where fecal samples give her hormonal clues about an animal's wellbeing.
It's an ideal job for a self-proclaimed zoo kid who spent countless hours at zoos growing up and began volunteering as soon as she was old enough.
"I'm out on the grounds all the time watching the animals for the behavior side, but if I'm overwhelmed by people, I can go hide in the lab," says Westcott, now an animal welfare monitoring specialist.
Her work today is a natural extension of the research she began as a Portland State graduate student.
For more than a decade, PSU's Biology Department and the Oregon Zoo have partnered on a little-known graduate program — one that gives doctoral students a rare opportunity to conduct research on animal wellbeing and conservation at the zoo while taking classes at PSU.
A WIN-WIN
When Nadja Wielebnowski joined the Oregon Zoo in 2012 as conservation and research manager, she set out to expand student opportunities for applied research — something she found to be invaluable while working in Chicago. In Portland, a colleague had already been collaborating informally with PSU graduate students and Wielebnowski worked to formalize the partnership.
"It's a win-win for everyone," she says. "We get more and more interest from students wanting to join the program because there are so few of them in the country."
For Wielebnowski, the partnership allows her to stay connected to academia while engaging students in studies directly tied to ongoing zoo programs. Her team studies animal behavior and hormone patterns to provide them with the best possible care — and, she says, the more they understand about the animals in their care, the more effective conservation can be for their counterparts in the wild.
"There's a lot we are trying to learn and understand about the welfare of these animals and what they need, so I'll give the students a general idea of what we need and then they make the project their own," she says.
During Westcott's doctoral program, she examined whether the zoo's summer concerts and other after-hour events affected the behavior and hormone responses of giraffes and cheetahs. Angelea McPartlin, a current doctoral student, focuses on snakes — a historically understudied group — to better understand their needs at the zoo, in the wild and even in human care as pets. And Leland Brown, who has managed a conservation program regarding non-lead hunting since 2015, is taking advantage of the PSU partnership to study bullet performance in the field — research directly linked to the zoo's California condor recovery efforts.
"All the projects have a clear purpose, but the students have a lot of wiggle room as to how they want to make this work, what they want to look at and then learning the different tools they can use," Wielebnowski says.
TRACKING ANIMAL WELLBEING
In the zoo's partnership with PSU, Westcott found the right combination of field and lab work. A funded research assistantship sealed the deal.
Wielebnowski proposed three project ideas and Westcott chose the concert study. Over two summers, she and a team of volunteers tracked the behavior and hormone levels of elephants, giraffes, cheetahs and painted dogs during concerts, nights with extended hours and quiet evenings.
My friends who were also doing Ph.Ds were stuck in the lab for 14 hours and I was watching Death Cab for Cutie and an elephant. I was having the best time.
"My friends who were also doing Ph.Ds were stuck in the lab for 14 hours and I was watching Death Cab for Cutie and an elephant," she laughs. "I was having the best time."
Westcott’s findings prompted a small but effective change for the cheetahs — providing access to their indoor habitat before concerts started. With that adjustment, the animals were able to rest instead of staying alert amid the evening activity.
When the pandemic hit, Westcott pivoted to study how the animals responded to months without visitors and the gradual return of crowds. Because her position was funded through PSU, she was able to continue working and essentially make herself indispensable.
"I was able to fill in on a lot of projects there, and I was so involved that when it came time for me to leave, they built a position essentially for me to fill," Westcott says.
Now a full-time researcher, she splits her time between monitoring animals, analyzing fecal samples in the endocrine lab and training volunteers. Her subjects range from a pair of orphaned cougar cubs who arrived at the zoo last winter to a snowy owl who can't fly.
Snowy Owls. Photos by Michael Durham, courtesy of Oregon Zoo.
"Ninety percent of my job is just poop everywhere," she says. "You can extract all sorts of adrenal hormones through the feces, and the animal doesn't even know you've collected it."
Working closely with the animal caregivers, she helps turn their intuitions into data by tracking coat condition, attentiveness and other behavioral cues. Comparing those observations with hormone levels often confirms what care staff already sense.
"If a keeper says an animal seems off and I see a spike in stress hormones, it means we can catch things sooner," she says. "Evolutionarily, most animals are trying to hide any sort of injury or illness they might have."
The data also highlights positive stress, like the excitement of a new enrichment toy or the arrival of a packmate.
With the zoo's annual ZooLights starting this month, Westcott and her team of volunteers will monitor whether the displays affect the animals — tracking sound and hormone levels, and using a new light meter to ensure the fun displays for visitors don’t flood too brightly into habitats.
ROOTING FOR THE LITTLE GUYS
When Angelea McPartlin started searching for doctoral programs, she knew what she wanted — a place to study animal wellbeing through a partnership between a university and a zoo. Few of these programs exist in the U.S. and PSU's collaboration with the Oregon Zoo checked every box: a zoo-based research project, relevant coursework and, most importantly, strong mentorship.
"Talking with Nadja, I immediately knew she was somebody I wanted to learn from," says McPartlin, now a year and a half into her program. "She's a great teacher and communicator, and hearing how she's approached welfare studies through the years and how it's grown has been really great."
Her PSU faculty advisors have helped shape her studies and committee, and she credits Westcott as an invaluable resource — someone who has already been where she is.
McPartlin's weeks look different from most graduate students'. She spends the bulk of her time at the zoo, starting Monday mornings with rounds to collect fecal and blood samples from a variety of animals. In the endocrine lab, she dries and prepares the samples for hormone analysis. When she's not providing lab support, she focuses on her own research project, studying two of the zoo's snake species: ball python and Central American boa.
Central American Boa and Ball Python. Photos by Michael Durham, courtesy of Oregon Zoo.
"I was trying to focus on animals that really could benefit from the attention this program would allow me to dedicate to them," McPartlin says.
Both species are common in zoos, yet little is known about their behavior or physiology.
"Reptiles have this reputation for being hardy or able to cope really well," she says. "They might be — or we might not really understand what we're looking at because we look at it from a mostly mammal perspective."
Using fecal samples and shed skins, she's measuring corticosterone levels to map seasonal patterns, and monitoring camera footage to see how the snakes spend their time.
"Snake TV is my favorite," she says with a laugh. "I just watch for hours as they move around."
I want to dedicate more resources to understudied species so we can make sure every animal gets what it needs.
McPartlin recently attended a herpetology conference, where she was able to connect with researchers from other zoos who may send fecal samples or set up similar camera studies to support her study. Wielebnowski says those networking experiences are critical for students' career trajectories.
"They become part of a professional community," she says.
McPartlin doesn't expect to follow the same path as Westcott in staying at the Oregon Zoo, but hopes to continue doing research at a zoo.
"I want to dedicate more resources to understudied species so we can make sure every animal gets what it needs," she says.
GETTING LEAD OUT OF THE WILD
For Leland Brown, a job with the zoo came first.
"One of the reasons I came was this ability to go back to school and improve my skillset," he says. "It only took about a decade."
Brown was hired in 2015 to launch an education and outreach program aimed at protecting wildlife by promoting the use of non-lead ammunition. The lead-free hunting education program grew out of the zoo's California condor recovery efforts. From a population low of 27 birds in 1987, there are now about 560 — but lead poisoning remains a threat to their survival. A single lead-based bullet, Brown explains, can fragment into hundreds of tiny pieces, contaminating the remains that scavengers like condors feed on.
California Condors. Photos by Michael Durham, courtesy of Oregon Zoo.
"Hunters are an important part of conservation management, and this is about helping them reduce an impact that's completely unintended," he says.
One of the biggest questions Brown hears from hunters is whether lead-free ammunition performs as well as traditional bullets. It’s something he’s wanted to study for years. Through the zoo's partnership with PSU, he's been able to do just that — beginning a master's program in 2022 before continuing into a Ph.D.
"A lot of folks don’t want to switch to something that doesn’t work as well," he says. "I’ve been trying to run this research since 2010, so finally being able to do it is pretty exciting."
What makes me really happy is when I see the students I've worked with go and do that type of work all over, whether it's in field conservation or in a zoo community.
Brown's study taps into community-sourced data from hunters who recorded the details of each hunt, including cartridge and bullet type, species, shot distance and internal organ damage. The goal is to better understand different bullet designs and establish some baseline performance metrics to support bullet selection and use.
"Having data on performance is going to be really valuable," he says. "It gives us some credibility in that we've done the work to look at performance and this is what we found. The other piece is if we do find issues with performance, we can go back to manufacturers and see how we can improve things."
His research has implications for wildlife management programs, invasive species management, landscape conservation and endangered species recovery programs.
GROWING THE PARTNERSHIP
For Wielebnowski, the results of the partnership speak for themselves.
"What makes me really happy is when I see the students I've worked with go and do that type of work all over, whether it's in field conservation or in a zoo community," Wielebnowski says.
Because of funding and time constraints, she's rarely able to support more than one student at a time, but she hopes to expand — especially now that Westcott is part of the team. Both see opportunities to grow the collaboration by involving other disciplines, from the zoo's education, nutrition and veterinary teams to PSU departments like engineering, psychology and chemistry.
"There are so many different things beyond just looking at the animals in biology," Westcott says. "We could overlap in ways that benefit both PSU and the zoo."