Back home at midnight and out again in the afternoon. Ah, yes, this is what I’ve been missing in the past four years: EAAF shorebirds in breeding plumage!

So amazing to see these windows are now bird safe!

Feipeng Huang@feipenghuang.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Thirteen juvenile Cedar Waxwings died from window collisions at @umassamherst.bsky.social ’s Isenberg School of Management over the past three weeks, including eight that were found together on October 2. We are training undergraduate students to prepare them as study skins for the museum.

Campus Red-tailed Hawks had a very successful evening taking two broods in a row. #umassamherst #raptors

Our fieldwork ends with the most rewarding part - finding flying chicks! Hudsonian Godwit chicks feed themselves and grow wings capable of crossing a hemisphere in under four weeks. We have read 7 of the 57 chicks we flagged - the highest survival since my first year in 2022!

1/Excited to share two new papers! The first is by Rozy Bathrick in @amornith.bsky.social on intra-specific variation in stopover site use. Rozy shows that Lesser Yellowlegs from different breeding sites use the Prairie Pothole Region in dramatically different ways. academic.oup.com/condor/artic...

Each year, our study sites welcome a few new breeders. Almost all of them are unflagged birds that dispersed from somewhere else. This year, however, we found H46, a chick we flagged in 2023, nesting just 200 m from her father!

In a rapidly changing world, site fidelity can be a trap. In our new paper in Movement Ecology, however, we find that stopover site fidelity by Whimbrel is associated with high flexibility in their local-scale habitat use. Awesome work by Maina Handmaker & folks at South Carolina DNR! rdcu.be/fn1EE

Our backyard is currently a foraging ground/high-tide roost for Whimbrels and an American Golden-Plover! Always amazed at how some shorebirds find the tiniest bit of habitat that’s just right for them. And, very cool that a grassy lawn can support some of the longest migrations in the world!

In case you want to watch a godwit feeding for 43 seconds… I always thought Hudsonian Godwits are loyal tide followers but apparently some birds find the high marsh profitable at low tide.

1/Our lab has two new papers out! Both highlight how nuanced the responses of many species are to climate change. The first was led by super undergrad Eden Smith: link.springer.com/article/10.1... The second by awesome PhD student @feipenghuang.bsky.social: academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...

The first Hudsonian Godwit report on eBird in Alaska this year didn’t come until yesterday, so it was great to see 100+ godwits when we were back in Beluga today! We read five flags, including two banded in Chile and A28 who we didn’t see last year (and has a geolocator with two years of data)!

In May 1967, 20 Canada Warblers died @umassamherst.bsky.social in just three days. Today, there are fewer than 20 reports of Canada Warblers in the county on the best spring day. But their story, and the problem and solutions behind it, are finally being seen by more members of the campus community.

Absolutely thrilled to share that our student-led Bird Safe UMass project was awarded a Massachusetts State Biodiversity Grant! We will use the $$ to place bird-safe window coverings on four of the deadliest buildings on the @umassamherst.bsky.social campus this spring. www.mass.gov/news/healey-...

Dougherty et al. present evidence that conditions in monsoonal molting areas influence the population dynamics of bird species that breed in western North America. Available now ahead of print! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Research to underpin management & #conservation: When scaled up across #flyways the demand-to-supply ratio of sites will provide a much more comprehensive understanding of limiting constraints on #bird populations than is currently available. esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Spring is arriving, but there's still snow in the forecast! How do late #winter storms affect our migratory #birds? Out now in @natecoevo.nature.com, we ask that Q with 25+yrs of #CitizenScience data and ~400 museum specimens collected after the 2021 Great TX Freeze: rdcu.be/e7aUy #EcoEvo #evolution

Storm-induced mass mortality results in both immediate and long-term consequences for a migratory songbird

Nature Ecology & Evolution - Combining 27 years of citizen science data with whole-genome sequencing, the authors show that mass mortality of purple martins caused by a severe winter...

rdcu.be

1/ Remember when Ted Cruz went to Cancún as the Texas power grid failed? It wasn't just the people of TX left behind, it was also the wildlife. Out now @natecoevo.nature.com, our paper led by @mstager.bsky.social & @treeswallows.bsky.social documents how bad the storms were for birds. rdcu.be/e7aUy

www.gi.alaska.edu/alaska-scien... #shorebirds

Alaska lovebirds go their own way | Geophysical Institute

During a month of endless summer light, a mated pair of shorebirds teaches their four chicks how to catch insects. The babies grow fat and strong on the tundra high in northeastern Alaska.

gi.alaska.edu

When you deploy a tracking device, how long do you expect it to last? We all hope for the best, but that's often not reality. 😞 For more information, check out Emily Weiser's new paper with help from many (many) folks in the shorebird community. nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Power source, data retrieval method, and attachment type affect success of dorsally mounted tracking tag deployments in 37 species of shorebirds

Animal-borne trackers are commonly used to study bird movements, including in long-distance migrants such as shorebirds. Selecting a tracker and attachment method can be daunting, and methodological ...

nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Every Thursday afternoon, we prepare window-collision birds for the museum, but my labmate Teresa suggested we use Halloween as an excuse to work on some owls today. And here’s what we found — a full stomach of caterpillars in a Barred Owl salvaged in December in Massachusetts!

Incorporating the full annual cycle when studying reproductive isolation and speciation | doi.org/10.1002/jav.... | Journal of Avian Biology | #ornithology 🪶

Incorporating the full annual cycle when studying reproductive isolation and speciation

As individual tracking devices and year-round genetic sampling become more accessible, research on the historically understudied nonbreeding period has exploded in the past decade. These studies are ...

doi.org

Thirteen juvenile Cedar Waxwings died from window collisions at @umassamherst.bsky.social ’s Isenberg School of Management over the past three weeks, including eight that were found together on October 2. We are training undergraduate students to prepare them as study skins for the museum.

This is the fourth Belted Kingfisher that has hit windows on the @umassamherst.bsky.social campus since July 2024… Two classes (Population Ecology and Global Change Ecology) are conducting daily surveys of 21 buildings to document these collisions this semester.

Direct human actions such as hunting and bird deterrence at aquaculture sites kill up to 10% of the populations of some shorebird species migrating along China’s coast each year, suggesting that this direct mortality is an overlooked threat to migratory populations 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Direct mortality due to humans threatens migratory shorebirds - Nature Ecology & Evolution

Direct human actions such as hunting and bird deterrence at aquaculture sites kill up to 10% of the populations of some shorebird species migrating along China’s coast each year, suggesting that this ...

nature.com

Finally have an excuse to add the Saint Louis Zoo to the map! #AOS2025

1/Lots going on from the Senner Lab and the @umassamherst.bsky.social community at #AOS2025! @feipenghuang.bsky.social gets the ball rolling with Poster #13 on Tuesday evening. He will be presenting on how Hudsonian Godwit chicks (try to) avoid predators in space and time.

1/Spring bird migration is getting earlier, right? Not necessarily! In our latest paper, led by former lab MSc student Lauren Puleo, we found that a population of Hudsonian Godwits breeding in Alaska is now arriving 6 days later than they were a decade ago. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Flexibility in the face of climate change? A rapid and dramatic shift towards later spring migration in Hudsonian godwits (Limosa haemastica) | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

With rapid environmental change, shifts in migration timing are vitally important for population stability in migratory species and have been widely documented. However, little remains known about how...

royalsocietypublishing.org

Banding the last chicks of the season was bittersweet - in the rapidly progressing sub-Arctic summer, they will never be able to catch up with the chicks that hatched more “on time”. The earliest are already over two weeks old.

Hard to believe, but this Hudsonian Godwit was banded as an adult in 2012 and evaded detection for the past 12 years! We found her paired with a male who has had successful nests over the past three years!

Magical moment with these Pectoral Sandpipers. They use the bog as a stopover.