Did you ask for a bird fact? No, but you're getting one whether you like it or not. 🪶

the most important question of presidents day is what did they think about birds and luckily for you chumps i've got answers birdhistory.substack.com/p/our-birdy-...

Fascinating chart with one outlier: Warren Buffett. At the low end, giving 0.06% of one's wealth is equivalent to: Net worth -> Lifetime Giving 50K->$30 100K->$60 500K->$300 $1M->$600 Most folks give far more by % in a *single year*. www.forbes.com/sites/forbes...

never thought I would read the phrase "competition for conspecifics faeces" in the abstract of a scientific paper nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

dark eyed junkers

excellent study congrats!

Go @armanafzadeh.bsky.social !! 🦃🦖🦎

body mass declines have been widely noted, often attributed to warmer temps here, a great test of competing hypotheses to explain body mass declines using a ridiculously massive dataset evidence is that body mass declines arise due to increasing intersp comp over time --- v cool study

Are Great Tits becoming Not So-Great Tits? New preprint from @davididiaquez.bsky.social et al. documenting decline in mass of adult Great Tits in @wythamwoods.bsky.social of ~1 s.d. over 47 years - results from carry-over effect of increased population density during the nestling period. Thread ⬇️

I swear it wasn't on purpose that my latest story ran on Valentine's Day: www.nytimes.com/2026/02/14/s... 🧪

Getting ready for a really cool community-led monitoring project in shade-grown coffee and cacao farms in Ecuador and Mexico. Quick stop in #ICTC2026 first! #BirdsPlusIndex @abcbirds.bsky.social @wildlifeacoustics.com

🪶 We'll post the answer in 24 hours.

Some of my favorite Chuck D shirts #DarwinDay #evolution

OTD 217 year ago, Charles #Darwin was born. Not only one of the most brilliant scientists and thinkers, but an inspiration on the power of knowledge and intellectual bravery. Values that are now more important to cherish than ever. Happy #DarwinDay!!!

🚨3 Lectureships in Biology 🚨 Come join us in Bristol @bristolbiosci.bsky.social! We are looking for new collegues working across a broad spectum of topics in biology, including ecology & environmental change. Get in touch if you have Qs! Apply here by 8 March: www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

Have you ever seen Blue Jays flighting with Crows and be like, I need to record this on eBird? Your comment could help with tracking species interactions! In this piece, we show how LLMs can be used to collect interaction data on large scales from comments on participatory science platforms. 1/3

Please repost! We are looking for two field technicians to work on our deer mouse project in the Colorado Rockies this spring-fall. Learn about physiology, ecology, and evolution, all in one project! Not to mention that you get to be in the ⛰️. Reach out if you have any questions.

all right Marius! great job leading this v cool effort to test ideas about elevational migration at global scale

To test this, we analysed vast amount of #eBird data. We looked at seasonal changes in the elevational distributions of birds - how high in the mountain birds go at different times of year - for nearly 11,000 avian populations across 34 mountain regions worldwide. 5/10

Finally, a big shout out to all the #eBirders recording birds in mountains without whom this research would not be possible! 10/10

Why is there such variation in the birds encountered as you go up or down a mountain? New paper in #ScienceAdvances examines how climate and ecological interactions drive bird distributions in mountains throughout the year: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 1/10 ⬇️

watching very large very athletic men celebrate their victories by pretending to be birds together is a great thing go Seahawks!

10 out of 10 bug

Nice paper out from the lab! With genomics in breeding programs of Red Siskins, they were able to ground-truth genomic estimates of kinship and determine that there were no introgressed canary genes from cross-breeding of pets. So the captive populations are "clean" link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I feel like this is a great time to remind everyone that it's not even technically wrong to say that logistic regression is machine learning

parent at preschool was giving a bag of Cape Cod potato chips to their kid and my son overheard and now the kids are chanting "Cape Cod Demon Hunters" and this should be a thing

Did you ask for a bird fact? No, but you're getting one whether you like it or not. 🪶

guess who's back, back again. NSF PRFB! if you want to address interesting problems in global change biology and the ever thorny problem of what limits species' elevational ranges, and are interested in a postdoc, please do reach out. www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

James says he likes lizards best but when I see him on campus he's usually carefully examining the venation patterns on leafs and telling passing students about xylem and phloem sweet paper Tony + James + Will!

Great job Gunnar and colleagues. This is the frustration and beauty of working with tropical diversity, and it is also the tragedy that we are losing so much diversity before observing and describing it. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

"Saw her in the Amazon With the voltage runnin' through her skin Standin' there with nothin' on She gonna teach me how to swim" for more about the electric (f)eel, check this primer by Ken Catania ⚡ www.cell.com/current-biol... (and yes, finally some current biology in Current Biology)

Our new paper on Bateman gradients in black coucals and white-browed coucals is out. Females of both species outperform males in mating and reproductive success - confirming the generality of Bateman's principle when sex roles differ. Check it out: royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

why do males defend territories in some species while pairs or family groups defend territories in others? then-undergrad Shreyas Arashanapalli did a fantastic project to find out, analyzing 3177 playback experiments on 264 species the best predictor? latitude academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

Hello Insectphile Friends! I’m giving a casual presentation to a “ladies lunch” group next week about insects. I can talk for days about insects, both scientifically & emotionally, but that’s just me. Tell me & help me, what should I include about why YOU love insects? Hugs & Bugs! 💚🪲 🌿

the best duck

One of the most bizarre conversations I had today. A gentleman came up to me tell me he had a stuffed passenger pigeon and wanted to know what to do with it. And indeed he has a stuffed passenger pigeon

35F / <2C forecast for Miami this weekend...it's falling iguana time! ATL -> MIA 🛫 here we come 🛫 🦎🦎🦎

Taxonomy and phylogeny are two sides of the same coin, but that doesn't mean they are always in agreement. I wrote a blog post on why the new Phylogeny Explorer in @birdsoftheworld.bsky.social is such a big deal in that regard, and what's in store next for us. eliotmiller.weebly.com/blog/birds-o...

oh YEAH! Ornithology + the Yucatan in December??? Count me in for #IOC2026! If I haven't met you IRL, let's meet there!

Congrats to incoming School of Biological Sciences Assistant Professor Armita Manafzadeh for her Carl Gans Young Investigator Award from the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Joining Georgia Tech in Aug. 2026, her lab will explore how joints work and how they evolved. bit.ly/3LG1jVV

I wrote about Minneapolis and why that Orwell quote everyone's been sharing makes me nervous about what comes next

Just a few days to go until our next deadline. Apply at the link below. #ornithology

OpenAccess science sounds great! But what if authors have to pay (Gold OA)? Well, clear biases appear: less participation from low and middle-income countries. Find all about it in our new study led by Pablo Huais and Javi Nori 👇@oikosjournal.bsky.social shorturl.at/bheb6 @peeer.bsky.social

Incredible self own for the US. The damage being done to the US scientific enterprise is generational. We will look back on this as a tipping point where the US chose all on its own to stop leading the world in science. www.science.org/content/arti...

Hi folks, the Asian Ornithological Conference will be happening from 14-17 Nov 2026 in Singapore. Please consider adding this to your conference schedule if you have bird research projects focused on the Asian region. Early registration opens 1 Feb, more info at aoc2026.sg

Oh shit BoW might really be goated for this. My guy @eliotmiller.bsky.social changed the damn game. This thing is fcking incredible. Hats off to the whole damn team. 👏 For those not in the know- BoW is worth the price of admission, now more than ever.

bro you phylolist?

If you thought regular bird listing was for nerds, wait til you get a load of phylolisting. @snacktavish.bsky.social

gnateaters represent the "eggs on legs" phenotype splendidly

Remarkable photo illustrating (American) Woodcock visual field macaulaylibrary.org/asset/616675...