Do you like baby birds? Fun photos and stories about chickadees in my latest guest post at Wing Beat, the blog of the @amornith.bsky.social. This post accompanies our recent paper on postnatal dispersal and recruitment in mountain chickadees 🪶 americanornithology.org/hatch-early-...

The Smithsonian's NMNH is accepting applications for various fellowships for graduate students and postdocs. Projects using NMNH resources are encouraged. For details: https://fellowships.si.edu/SIFP #postdoc

🦜🐣🦢🦉🦃🦤🦩🪶 Can’t wait to share this with everyone!

Nice blog by @laurenwhitenack.bsky.social about her recent paper on phenological flexibility in mountain chickadees. communities.springernature.com/posts/mounta...

The 2025-26 Eco-Evo job list is out. Good luck to those applying! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

New paper from the lab by @laurenwhitenack.bsky.social Breeding phenology and clutch size were repeatable within individuals, but no strong evidence for clear benefits of phenotypic plasticity in response to climatic variation. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

WSU biology is hiring a vertebrate ecologist! wsu.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/WSU_Jo...

Using long-term data from individually marked songbirds, Vatka et al. discovered that breeding time trends are not attributed to an evolutionary change but phenotypic plasticity. Read now! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Must cache food

🚨🚨 New tenure track position in #ConservationBiology @oberlincollege.bsky.social in the #Biology department--come join us, and contribute to our brand new Environmental Science major too! #biologyjobs #ecologyjobs jobs.oberlin.edu/postings/16671

Animal Cognition job at Hunter College CUNY: cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/...

Adult mountain chickadees are molting heavily - but juveniles look much ‘cleaner’

It’s that time of the year again - nutcrackers are going after pine cones

New paper from the lab by @jwelklin.bsky.social In mountain chickadees, there is positive assortment by age in pairing, but such assortment appears due to pair longevity rather than active mate choice based on age. academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...

New publication! 🚨 If you're looking for a paper on what great tits eat then this is for you! 🦋🐛🐞🪲🐦 We looked at variation in diet using DNA metabarcoding and found lots of differences between adult and young birds and between habitat types. @ucc.ie onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Today's highlighted talk is a great contribution by Arnon Lotem, discussing the evolution of learning mechanisms and their fine-tuning to fit different species' needs youtu.be/At9uqrPNz5Y @royalsocietypublishing.org @cornishjackdaws.bsky.social

🧪 CRITICAL UPDATE: The House draft version is now out. ✅ Like the Senate's version, there's no cut to NASA's budget. ❌ There's a 23% proposed cut to NSF's budget. 8-page summary: appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-su... Draft bill: appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

The next in our series of highlighted talks from our @royalsocietypublishing.org discussion meeting on "Selection Shapes Diverse Animal Minds" is by Rob Barton (University of Durham): youtu.be/tVqgb0PosHw

Banded last two chickadee nests of the season at high elevation. In one nest, both parents are 9-years old and bred together for many years. And their nestlings weigh quite a bit more than the average. In chickadees, older patents raise higher quality offspring. Here is 9-yr old female

A thing I've been working on is out now: I wrote the cover story for the summer issue of Living Bird! Scientists have sequenced the genomes of almost all 25 (!) song sparrow subspecies AND connected their genes to how they're each likely to fare under climate change.

Today's highlighted talk is by Maurico Gonzalez-Ferrero @mauriciogforero.bsky.social, talking about evolutionary expansion of the human brain @royalsocietypublishing.org youtu.be/vhqKSSYMPaQ

If you’re starting grad school in Fall 2025 (or planning to apply and start in Fall 2026), this is a foundation award similar to federal grad fellowships (like NSF GRFP). Always worth applying if you’re an eligible student!

Lots more detail about this work in this nice thread from @andreaestandia.bsky.social. A collaboration with @nilomr.bsky.social @jon-slate.bsky.social funded by @erc.europa.eu and @ukri.org grants bsky.app/profile/andr...

Like many 'populations' the great tits in Wytham are a meta-population, with extensive immigration. We know very little about who & what immigrants are - here @andreaestandia.bsky.social et al use genomic data to try to understand origins & consequences of immigrants www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Selection shapes diverse animal minds: We recorded the talks at our @royalsocietypublishing.org discussion meeting last year to share with those who couldn’t be there. Our first speaker is Stephen Montgomery (Bristol University) @ebablab.bsky.social. youtu.be/BzmRZlhTcrc?...

Next up is co-organizer Alex Thornton @cornishjackdaws.bsky.social talking about social drivers of cognitive evolution @royalsocietypublishing.org. youtu.be/yb4iSyPPaaI?...

New paper from the lab - the overview of our long-term work on selection on spatial cognition in chickadees. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Selection Shapes Diverse Animal Minds: our special issue of @royalsocietypublishing.org Phil Trans B on the diverse evolutionary processes underlying cognitive evolution is out today. Thanks to all our contributors! royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...

Just got this from NSF: On June 20, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, in No. 1:25-cv-11231-IT, vacated NSF’s 15% Indirect Cost Rate policy (NSF 25-034). In compliance with the court’s decision, NSF will not implement the policy at this time.

Sierra summer

Two months back I had the honour to visit UC Davis (kindly hosted by @katelaskowski.bsky.social) to give a Storer Lecture on the power of long-term studies of individuals in ecology & evolution. Great people doing great science despite the current climate. Video ⬇️ video.ucdavis.edu/media/The+Po...

“The humiliation and censorship of the world's leading scientists and doctors, destroying research grants on a completely arbitrary collection of buzzwords linked to an imagined ‘woke mind virus,’ is a pathetically childish temper tantrum with utterly criminal impacts on the nation ...”.

Our field work requires various skills

Barn swallow, Reno #birds

Mountain chickadees #birds

Mountain chickadees started incubating at our lower elevation (6700 ft) site

I am looking for a postdoc wanting to use functional genomics to understand why birds 🐦 struggle with climate warming in @erc.europa.eu project #HotLife. Ideal candidate is a molecular evolutionarybiologist. Join us at @biologylu.bsky.social. Details 👇 shorturl.at/wijEq Would appreciate a re-post!

happy to see our study on genetic parallelism of reproductive isolation in chickadee hybrid zones out in @evolletters.bsky.social—great work led by Georgy Semenov & Scott Taylor: doi.org/10.1093/evle...

Nice late Spring weather next week at our high elevation field site - temperatures on Monday-Tuesday are like in January. And 5 inches of snow - just as chickadees started building nests.

Cover photo by @sonnenbird.bsky.social for our recent paper in the Royal Society Open Science paper.

Spread the word: we're #hiring! We have an open #research fellowship position for #postdocs with their own research idea: It includes an own budget, a #PhD student position and the possibility to conduct independent research on animal #navigation and/or #magnetoreception 🧭🦤🦇🐟⚛️🧪👩‍🔬! sfb1372.de/jobs

My NSF PRFB on the genetics of female polymorphism in hummingbirds was terminated yesterday. I don't have much to say, I'm just sad. We've discovered so much, and could have gone so much further. If anyone else is in the same boat, esp postdocs, please reach out, it would be good to connect.

Caller ID: Meltz et al. (@cbsturdy.bsky.social) show black-capped chickadees learn to discriminate chickadee calls by individual in go/no-go task but don't generalize to feebee calls Suggests they may use more context info in wild onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics

New paper from the lab by @laurenwhitenack.bsky.social showing short-distance postnatal dispersal and that fledgling mass and fledging time are associated with recruitment success in mountain chickadees. academic.oup.com/auk/advance-...