Data and Code associated with "Bird feeder cleaning prevents

The dataset was collected over the course of two independent experiments on captive house finches. Both experiments sought to understand whether cleaning the high-contact surfaces of tube-style bird feeders with a bleach wipe can reduce the spread of a common songbird bacterial pathogen, Mycoplasma gallisepticum. In the “Infected cagemate” experiment (associated data files titled FCE1), MG-inoculated “donor” birds were co-housed with initially-healthy receiver birds, and the high-use feeder surfaces shared by each pair were wipe-cleaned every other day for half of the study pairs. In the “Fomite-only” experiment (files titled FCE2), we transferred bacteria-contaminated feeders into cages of initially-healthy “receiver” birds, with or without wipe-cleaning of high-use feeder surfaces prior to transfer. We tracked pathogen loads and scored disease in the receiver birds of both studies as metrics of disease transmission. We also quantified changes in antibodies of receiver birds before and after feeder transfer in the "Fomite-only" experiment.