Chick sampling was closely supervised by Ariella, this weekend. Ariella hatched in 2022, prospected in 2024, then started breeding with Vedran in 2025. Last year they fledged 1 chick, and this year things are looking good for fledging 2. 🥰

Talking about the chicks... they are doing amazing! There is plenty of food around, so they are growing up fast, with the first ones having fledged this week and many more getting ready to follow that example.

After last year’s successful pilot study, GPS-tracking @gullbilledterns-de.bsky.social's birds, we’re back at it this year. The lovely bird @harrykuipers.bsky.social photographed is L39, a 5-yr old female, breeding with 4-yr old R75 on nest 8. She laid two eggs that both hatched successfully.

A few days after successfully defending my PhD, another chapter of my thesis is out in Environmental Toxicology!🥳 Here, we show that bird embryos actively mobilize Hg from eggshells, key for better understanding Hg impact on wildlife. More information can be found here👇 doi.org/10.1002/tox....

Hosted 25 kids at the museum this morning. 10 interviews are in the pocket, and the next event is planned too. One of the kids drew me this card as a thank-you. Mission accomplished. :-)

Excited to celebrate the opening of the Kids4Kids Mobile Exhibition on Bird Migration with @genmig.bsky.social ! 🐦🎙 A project where children communicate science to their peers through podcasts, interactive exhibits, and a VR journey following a robin's migration.🌍✨ #Kids4Kids

awesome work by @junishigohoka.bsky.social highlighting the underappreciated role of shifting balancing selection. jun used demography inference, pogen simulation under our blackcap demography, and ABC to (i) identify the type of balancing selection and (ii) estimate its spatially varying parameters

impressive thesis, amazing defense talk and utterly gorgeous hat! huge, huge congratulations, Matteo, fly on! it was a pleasure having had you with us @ifv-whv.bsky.social 🪶🪺🐦🧬

Huge congratulations to @matteobeccardi.bsky.social on successfully defending his PhD thesis "Intrinsic and extrinsic factors shaping individual quality in birds"!!!🐦🥚🐣🤔🎓 🎉 Cheers to the next chapter!!!🍾🍾🍾

Piro et al. Tracking of adult males and females across a migratory divide: migration strategies of a western baltic common tern (Sterna hirundo) population link.springer.com/article/10.1... #ornithology #seabirds

The 2-year-olds have started to arrive en masse and, with 83, now make up 18% of the registered birds at the colony. At 470 of those, we are exactly 70 above the number we had this time last year. Food is looking good too, and the chicks are growing nicely. ❤️

Migratory birds perform extraordinary journeys—but we still don’t fully understand how they do it. #TiiaKärkkäinen, @pablosalmon.bsky.social & @barbarahelm.bsky.social reveal why the field of migration physiology is still wide open for new discoveries ➡️ vist.ly/56fr7 #ornithology

Hatching has started at @gullbilledterns-de.bsky.social's colony site too. ❤️

The Banter See breeding season in numbers so far: 226 males and 210 females (aged 2 - 25) have been registered, 319 clutches have been produced, 257 chicks have hatched, 93 blood samples have been collected and 48 birds have been caught for our geolocator-project.

Fresh as can be. Hatching has started at the Banter See common tern colony. ❤️

New paper: Does migration alter cellular ageing? Migratory blackbirds had longer telomeres (but similar mitochondrial density) than resident conspecifics at a North Sea stopover site, suggesting potential physiological adaptations linked to migration ➡️ vist.ly/559cq #ornithology #birds

Submit your poster presentation for the upcoming annual meeting now! The annual meeting will take place from 16 to 20 September at the University of Mainz. The main topics are #LifeHistory, #BehaviouralEcology, #MovementEcology, and environmental endocrinology. www.do-g.de/veranstalten...

I title this arty photo "Dedication"! @ccrowther.bsky.social did great at Pint of Science last night: how long should you wait for your mate to return from migration before concluding "screw this, likely dead"? - Bummed you missed it? Come to @isbe2026.bsky.social or inspect a poster at #ExE2026.

Bugging is underway, and we are missing @matteobeccardi.bsky.social who spent two seasons supplementing the team to collect data on sex- and age-specific mitochondrial functioning in the terns. His paper on this just came out in @jexpbiol.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1242/jeb....

In other lovely news: the breeding season of @gullbilledterns-de.bsky.social is well underway too and parents of the first three nests have been identified. Here are L28 and L13, last-year sweethearts, this year breeding at nest 3. More news on the blog: gelochelidon.de/home. :-)

Last year, @genmig.bsky.social turned her office @ifv-whv.bsky.social into a recording studio, and 6 kids from a local highschool interviewed scientists to learn about bird migration, that of the Banter See terns included. The result can now be enjoyed online: ifv-vogelwarte.de/en/news-and-...

maybe you remember when six kids took over my office and turned it into a podcast studio? s.gwdg.de/hvepyt - well this project now fully fledged and the kids4kids podcast (in german) has been relieased! creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/... - listen in how kids talk about bird migration, it is cool!

Proud to see this work led by PhD student @matteobeccardi.bsky.social now published in @jexpbiol.bsky.social ! The study investigates how sex and age influence mitochondrial function in wild Common terns 🪶 Check it out below ⬇️ bsky.app/profile/matt...

Excited to share our new paper out in @jexpbiol.bsky.social! Here, we investigated how sex and age shape mitochondrial function under natural conditions in a long-lived seabird, the Common tern. Read the paper here for more information👇 doi.org/10.1242/jeb....

How do migratory birds navigate massive barriers like the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau? Asian stonechats reveal migratory divides, hybridization, and evolving routes across extreme landscapes. doi.org/10.1093/evle... Image credit Wikimedia.

“Counting cases, conserving species: addressing highly pathogenic avian influenza in wildlife”. Out now, and open access, in Biological Reviews: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

happy #worldmigratorybirdday

Happy #WorldMigratoryBirdDay! 🌍🐦 We're grateful to be able to study these amazing athletes as they connect continents, to learn when they are where, with the end goal of helping generations to come successfully complete the same journeys.

Today, Junior Rangers visited to try out our Suitcase Science project. We drew & talked about terns; played tern-bingo to complete a pedigree & learn about variation in reproductive success; puzzled until we understood how terns get polluted by mercury; and turned postcards into migration routes.

Look who arrived as well! 147 little field assistants made their way into one of our incubators. These laboratory-bred kissing bugs will help us collect blood samples from incubating terns. Stored in a fake egg for c. 20 minutes, they collect blood, which we then gratefully collect from them.

The first eggs of the 2026 season are a fact. Four clutches were started yesterday, today we're at nine. ❤️

Some very happy news on this Monday: over the weekend, two of our GPS-tagged gull-billed terns returned to Neufelderkoog and started uploading their data to the hub. Although the data transfer is not yet complete, both seem to have spent their winter in Guinea-Bissau.

One week in, 149 birds have been registered. Among them is 25-yr-old Roy, currently the oldest bird of the population, after most other elderly terns died during the HPAI outbreaks of 2022 and 2023.

Artificial selection for increased reproductive effort accelerates actuarial senescence and reduces lifespan in a precocial bird doi.org/10.1098/rspb... | #ProcB #Evolution

We are looking for a full-time, permanent, animal caretaker in Wilhelmshaven. Work with songbirds & quail in an international research team: - Bird care & welfare - Breeding programs - Hand-rearing chicks - Husbandry & hygiene - Data records More info: ifv-vogelwarte.de/en/institute...

Japanse kwartels die grote eieren leggen leven korter

Out now in Environmental Monitoring and Assessment: a study in which we assessed whether mercury levels vary among feather types within individual terns, how feather mercury levels relate to those in blood, and whether all levels vary with sex and age in a similar way: doi.org/10.1007/s106...

New paper out: Artificial selection for increased reproductive effort accelerates actuarial senescence and reduces lifespan in a precocial bird url: royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article... @uniexecec.bsky.social @erikpostma.bsky.social @joelpick.bsky.social y.social @oscarvedder.bsky.social

Wow, after 8 birds arrived on the 12th of April, 57 more arrived on the 13th! I've not seen an 'arrival-explosion' like it. The birds seem excited about it too, wasting no time between arrival, courtship and the start of 'nest building'.

In other lovely news: the first gull-billed terns have returned over the weekend too. You can follow their stories on the blog of @gullbilledterns-de.bsky.social's website: gelochelidon.de/blog/gull-bi...

As an update: 6 more birds were registered by the system yesterday, such that 8 birds are known to have arrived in total, with more spotted today. Synchronous, but not early, as the first-arrival summary-graph for the years 1994-2026 shows:

Live from the field: they’re here! The first two registrations of the 2026 season are a fact and go to Calderon and Pricilla. ❤️

The museum we designed and built at the field site, to share both our view on, and growing knowledge of, the Banter See common terns now has a sign, and is open for business. Opening times can be found here: www.wattenmeer-besucherzentrum.de/flussseeschw...

🧬 New study! How do mitochondria change across life? We tracked mtDNAcn within Zebra finches and found early-life decline and links of mtDNAcn to late-life flight performance #Ornithology #Physiology #Mitochondria @sbohvm.gla.ac.uk @ifv-whv.bsky.social 🔗 royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article...

Among 480 (!!) birds caught by #TeamSAFRINGSénégal last night, there were 4 Banter See birds, including 5-yr old Piccolo, who prospected in 2023 and bred in 2024 and 2025, receiving a geolocator in 2025. After a quick check, he is now on his way to us! ❤️ Thanks to Bruno Portier for the photo!

A fascinating plenary at #EOU26 by Miriam Liedvogel (@genmig.bsky.social) Uncovering the mysteries of migration through work on blackcaps, and ending with an important reminder: the need for outreach and communication beyond academia, especially with children. Inspiring on many levels.

New publication alert! 🥳🍾 With Prof. Dr. Kraiczy's lab, we asked how natural genetic variation affects the function of immune modulatory Borrelia proteins and if this could influence how pathogenic the populations are to humans. Out now in Scientific Reports: doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Help us find ticks in Germany! NABU has launched a nation wide effort to understand the range expansion of ticks in Germany. With changing climates, tick species have been able to extend their ranges. You can help by reporting tick images as explained below: www.nabu.de/tiere-und-pf...

The observation huts and rat protection are up. It's beginning to look a lot like the breeding season of 2026. Thanks to yet another dreamteam this season!❤️

Today we celebrate ‘Dress for STEM Day’, and wear purple clothes to celebrate all women in #STEM (#science, #technology, #engineering, #mathematics) and raise awareness to the underrepresentation of women in these fields.