Among my ornithologist colleagues I am perhaps best known for combining ornithology with entomology.  The reason for this is that I worked on bird-insect interactions for my dissertation, I first published in that area, and that interest carries to this day.  And it’s an important topic that relatively few people study.  After all, insects are the most important herbivores by biomass in most ecosystems, and invertebrates are the most important food group for wildlife in general.  Work published from my dissertation includes review papers on sampling arthropods (Cooper and Whitmore 1990) and assessing avian diets (Rosenberg and Cooper 1990). 

Through the years, my students, colleagues and I have looked at bird response to insect pest invasions (Cooper and Smith 1995, Gale et al. 2001) and pesticide application (e.g., Cooper et al. 1990, McCasland et al. 1998, Marshall et al. 2002), army ants and attendant birds in tropical landscapes (Roberts et al. 2000a, b), arthropod response to alternative cotton management systems (Cederbaum et al. 2004), and songbirds as predators of caterpillars (e.g., Cooper et al. 1990, Marshall and Cooper 2004).  Currently, we have several projects in the lab that fit in this theme (see Nora Diggs and Dawn Drumtra), and an NSF grant investigating the effect of birds on herbivore numbers (using a manipulative experiment) and the response of insects and birds to elevational gradients and climate change (see Kirk Stodola).