Competition shapes the urban distribution of chickadee species nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

In all honesty, I wasn’t liking where this was headed at the start, but he turned it around pretty quickly there “The system is, by definition, us. We make these rules up and then choose to treat them like immutable laws of nature. They’re not.”

Out now on the cover of @journal-evo.bsky.social! Led by Sarah Khalil, we took a genomic approach to investigate the hybrid zone between different-colored Red-backed Fairywren subspecies. We found some interesting candidate genes under selection. Check it out! academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

A long and busy week ended on a high yesterday. So proud of Dr @jyang19.bsky.social for sailing through her PhD viva, the final step of a long journey in my lab from a Silwood masters degree to a doctorate. 💪 Big thanks to Profs Cris Banks-Leite and Gavin Thomas for examining.

Made a new friend on my walk yesterday. #americanchestnut www.inaturalist.org/observations...

Using automated acoustic monitoring, citizen science, and centuries of ornithological research and understanding to quantify ecological integrity at scale. The BirdsPlus Index, a novel method for assessing site-level conservation values. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This is one of those, "well of course" sorts of papers that is actually *super* important and needed to be done. Well done @louisbackstrom.bsky.social @ali--johnston.bsky.social, excited to have a proper read! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Super proud of Dr. Dan Nesbit @dannesbit.bsky.social, who passed his viva today (with no corrections!). Thanks to @josephtobias.bsky.social and Sally Street for examining! 🥳

Although they seem to be going to sleep, temperate trees are very busy right now. Fine roots are growing, and inside the buds, next years leaves, stems, and flowers are being formed. That means that autumn weather determines some or all of next year's growth. Read about it at Our Trees.

My lab is hiring a 2-yr hummingbird evolution and genomics postdoc and a 1-yr salaried research and lab tech. Both with full U. Wyoming benefits. Please spread the word! Info below. Best consideration date Nov 1, start dates early Spring 2026.

Remember how viewing big phylogenies in your browser used to be hard? Got something to share with you all in a few weeks. My bird nerd tanks are so full right now, can't wait to share some with you all. @birdsoftheworld.bsky.social

Well, it's official. After our paper last year (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....), the Slender-billed Curlew is officially declared Extinct today. Scientists dream of describing new species, not writing their obituary and epitaph, knowing that they are gone forever #ornithology

Another massive movement of migratory birds underway tonight — nearly 1 Billion Birds! With the full moon, you might be able to see some silhouettes zipping by. You can make your own flow maps here (just hit record): aeroecolab.com/uslights

Today was a hard day for Ph.D. students who found out that they can no longer apply for NSF's prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship Program. "Devastating“ was how one student described it to me. #GradSchool #NSFGRFP www.science.org/content/arti...

**PhD POSITIONS** I am recruiting 1-2 PhD students to work on sociality and cognition in Monk Parakeets, starting Fall 2026. Full ad is here: hobsonresearch.com/index.php/20... (please help spread the word!)

I had no idea there used to be a marine-based mink species in eastern North America! Super interesting, also sad. Only recently pushed to extinction en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_mink

How many species have been rediscovered? Which were surprising? What are the prospects for finding the remaining lost species? Learn more in a free webinar from @birdsoftheworld.bsky.social on Sept. 18 @ noon ET: birdsoftheworld.org/bow/news/sea.... #birds 🌎

We just pushed a new version of the global bird phylogeny to Github. Updated topology (v1.5), and now in the most recent Clements/eBird taxonomy. We'll push to CRAN soon too, but head over and grab the most recent clootl version now. @snacktavish.bsky.social github.com/eliotmiller/...

The GRFP lives!! (due end of October) www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

Like woodpeckers? Or population genomics? Or three-species hybridization? Or selective sweeps? Then this is for you! The typeset version of "Evidence for ancient selective sweeps followed by differentiation among three species of Sphyrapicus sapsuckers" is published today: doi.org/10.1093/jeb/...

Some validation for my recent efforts in uploading some old images of unidentified species to @inaturalist.bsky.social – turns out I photographed an undescribed poison-dart frog in the Western Amazon 18 years ago 🌎 🧪🐸🪶 #ornithology #herpetology 🧵1/21

our paper on how light pollution affects bird vocal behavior is out today in Science!! w/ @brentpease.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Bad plan. Definitely get a rabies shot.

🐦🔬 Recruiting PhD students! 🌎🧬 I’m looking for 1–2 PhD students to join our team starting Fall 2026 at the Sam Noble Museum & University of Oklahoma. Our research: 🐦 birds • 🌍 biogeography • 🌴 Neotropics • 🧬 population genomics • 🌱 speciation 👉 Learn more: www.moncriefflab.org Please share!

A big congratulations to William Farhan-Rios on this paper in @pnas.org, featuring a study of tropical-forest change over four decades along the Amazon-to-Andes elevational gradient in Bolivia and Peru 🌴 ⛰️ 🌐 @mobotgarden.bsky.social @livingearthcollab.bsky.social 1/3 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Poison sumac is like poison ivy. Only worse.

Happy to see this one out. We did a phylogenetic analysis of African Sesuvium using herbarium collections and genome skimming. We assembled ~9000 loci from orthologous genes identified from transcriptome data. We also described a new species! 🌿 #evobio #iamabotanist www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

One of our most beautiful native trees is Franklinia, Franklinia alatamaha. First seen on the Altamaha River in what is now Georgia in 1765 and transplanted to the northeastern US, it is now extinct in the wild. Read the amazing story of this tree at Our Trees.

Don't be me! Fairly new to Python, transforming data, and I discovered log1p, a "more numerically accurate way to compute log(1+x) when x is very close to zero". Genius! The number of times I've had to hand-code this in R, and it's more accurate?! Just realized log1p is also a base fxn in R 💩

Great graphics and article, featuring a highly technical and very scientific quote by a sassy bird doctor www.allaboutbirds.org/news/birds-d...

It's nice to see more discussion about the origin of pigeons that, like gentle and humble dandelions, follow in the dismissive wreckage of human history, without any fault of their own.

Just spent two late weekend nights nerding the f* out, and now I'm going to spend a little of my Sunday morning bringing you the fruits of my labors! Stare at these trees with me. What do you see?

In case you were wondering what to get me for Christmas www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCwn...

🫠. A tree came out today with 9,072 bird species, all placements based on actual DNA. It looks like they used eBird 2022 taxonomy; 10,096 were recognized back then. That means these folks just dropped (molecularly well informed) knowledge on 83% of the world's birds. www.cell.com/current-biol...

🚨 The New Age of global bird phylogenies continues! Hot on the heels of the fantastic updated tree created by @eliotmiller.bsky.social and others, we use a different approach to generate a near-comprehensive timetree of >9000 bird species. 1/3 www.cell.com/current-biol... 🧪🌐🪶

1. Kevin Gross and I just posted a new science-of-science preprint. This one explores the looming peer review crisis. As many of you know, it's becoming significantly more difficult for journal editors to find scholars willing to serve as peer reviewers for submitted manuscripts.

New paper out today in @pnas.org presenting near-complete phylogeny of the Grevilleoideae subfamily of Proteaceae plants, representing years of work and huge collaboration from an amazing team - ft. @marcelcardillo.bsky.social @hsauquet.bsky.social @austinmast.bsky.social and many others not on bsky

I've wanted to write this article for years. About my and other's struggles to even survive sometime in #academia. Thank you to the amazing editors at @plosbiology.org that gave me the forum to write this piece. #science

Sweet sweet Passerina sweep. Pokedex is full!

Trying to copy email addresses from Outlook is maddening. I spend about 5 mins a day trying to do it, and another ten minutes reading shit posts by other people who also can't figure it out.

I am looking for a postdoc to work on cutthroat trout evolutionary and conservation genetics, starting ~January 2026. Get in touch or find me at #Evol2025 for more information!

🦆 My new R package {avilistr} is live on CRAN! 🎉 The first unified global bird taxonomy (11,131 species) is now accessible to #rstats users. I built it this weekend after Cornell Lab's AviList release last week! 🪿 Blog: www.dalyanalytics.com/blog/avilist... 💻 GitHub: github.com/dalyanalytic...

Wait WTF? How did I not know about this?

"Scientists Are Using Drones to Unleash Thousands of Mosquitoes in Hawaii in a Bid to Save Native Birds. The lab-raised, male mosquitoes are meant to breed with the invasive ones on the islands and produce sterile eggs that will help suppress malaria." www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/s...

Last February, I led a proposal submission that encompassed six months, hundreds of hours, four institutions, a massive team, and and 256 pages. NSF just informed us that the entire Biology Integration Institute program was archived and our proposal would not even be reviewed. With a form email.

I love catbirds so much, but why are they so stupid around cars and bikes? Gotta be one of the most car-struck birds in the country.

i made a new framework for modelling stochastic eco-evolutionary dynamics of multivariate traits !! doi.org/10.1101/2025...

maybe my favorite paper I've written, I have a synthesis out today early access in @asn-amnat.bsky.social today that attempts to answer a simple but slippery question: what is an elevational range? doi.org/10.1086/737130

NEW SCIENCE! 🚨🚨🚨🧪🪶🌐 Our paper is now online at @natecoevo.nature.com! “Geographic redistributions are insufficient to mitigate exposure to climate change in North American birds”. We know birds are moving north with climate change, but what are the consequences? www.nature.com/articles/s41...