Oh, rock on: Limited Evidence That Interspecific Nest-Site Competition and Facilitation Drive Range Limits | Gilbert et al., GEB (I do love a clear title!) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Limited Evidence That Interspecific Nest‐Site Competition and Facilitation Drive Range Limits

Aim Biotic interactions form a pillar of niche concepts but are frequently overlooked as range-limiting factors. At local scales, ‘non-excavator’ bird species—those that nest in tree cavities but ca...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

recruiting a couple new grad students to start in january, please share! www.gilbertecology.com/opportunities

Peak bird migration is nearly upon us. May your mornings be full of warblers, orioles, grosbeaks and tanagers!

Our new paper on the cover of PNAS, led by Anderson Bueno and Chase Mendenhall, shows that that terrestrial matrices and higher nearby tree cover reduce bird extirpations and boost species richness in forest remnants #ornithology www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🪶🌍

New in @science.org ‼️ In the most comprehensive study to date, we show that wildlife trade is driving animal-to-human zoonotic spillover at a planetary scale, with +1 spillover per host every 10 years. Live animal markets and illegal trade pose even greater risks. 🔓 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Well, that's fun. Link to the paper if you're curious: besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Behavioural co‐option of plant secondary compounds by a cavity‐nesting bird is an adaptation against competition and predation

Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Rebecca Heisman@rheisman.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I'm spending less time on social media lately, but I wanted to share that I have a story in the spring issue of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology magazine, about the story behind Red-breasted Nuthatches' quirky habit of painting the entrances of their nest cavities with pine resin. 🪶

🚨 Hiring a postdoc (2 years)! We’re looking for someone with skills in data science, remote sensing, or computer science: 🛰️ Build next-gen nighttime light products 🦅 Link light spectra to migration & collision risk Apply or reach out! aeroecolab.com/opportunities

Purdue AeroEco Lab Opportunities

aeroecolab.com

All 33 shrike species trace their roots to Africa ~8 million years ago, when C4 grasses exploded across the continent. Oh, and Magpie Shrikes? Just big Lanius. The first complete shrike phylogeny reveals Laniidae is basically one giant genus. doi.org/10.1111/zsc.... #2026MMM #RIP

MAJOR NEWS! We just launched an awesome new tool! The illustrated Birds of the World Phylogeny Explorer lets users trace any bird’s lineage, compare species relationships, and explore major evolutionary milestones with a click of a button. SHARE and EXPLORE! birdsoftheworld.org/bow/news/phy...

Our paper on #HMMs with periodically ⏰ varying transition probabilities is published! 🎉 @carlinafeldmann.bsky.social, Sina Mews, @rmichels.bsky.social @rolandlangrock.bsky.social doi.org/10.1214/25-AOAS2107 We derive the periodically #stationary distribution and the implied dwell-time distribution

A massive thank you to @ecolsocaus.bsky.social for the "Next Generation Ecologist" Award and for having me give a plenary (😵‍💫). A whirlwind of a week

Hey prospective PhD students 👋 happy to work with students interested in developing a proposal

Casey terHorst@ecoevolab.bsky.social · 11mo ago

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

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

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)

nsf.gov

We have a new paper developing methods for looking at bird-fire macroecology. What’s most fascinating to me is that the magnitude *and* direction of fire effects can vary enormously across a species range. Stationarity is dead!! Long live non-stationarity!! doi.org/10.1002/fee....

Evaluating macroecological fire impacts on bird populations

Fire regimes are context-dependent, as are the ways that animals respond. However, most information on animal responses to fire comes from short-term local field studies, which are hard to extrapolat....

doi.org

🚨 🐜 is there a Bluesky starter pack for researchers who don’t study ants but who get lightheaded every time there’s an awesome ant paper? CC @mariusw.bsky.social @jrichardalbert.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants - Nature

In a case of obligate cross-species cloning, female ants of Messor ibericus need to clone males of Messor structor to obtain sperm for producing the worker caste, resulting in males from the same moth...

nature.com

Animals don’t just live in their environments—they transform them. And in doing so, they may also shape their own evolutionary trajectories. Our new paper in Trends in Ecology & Evolution introduces a framework for zoogeochemical niche construction. A thread 👇

Trends in Ecology & Evolution@cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Online now: Zoogeochemical niche construction: how animal-mediated biogeochemistry affects evolution

🐦🔬 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!

Moncrieff Lab | Bird Evolution

The Moncrieff Lab is a research lab based at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History on the campus of the University of Oklahoma. Research in the lab involves museum specimens, fieldwork, and...

moncriefflab.org

A recent Statistical Report in "Ecology"👇

Francisco Rodriguez-Sanchez@frodsan.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Sample size considerations for species co-occurrence models #ecopubs @esajournals.bsky.social 'While occupancy patterns are often robust to limited sample size, reliable inference about co-occurrence demands substantially larger datasets than many studies currently achieve' doi.org/10.1002/ecy....

New pub alert! Very excited to share work providing actionable insights into how we can better implement biosecurity and plan surveillance for avian influenza in the US. This virus doesn’t look to be going away so best to adjust accordingly.

Avian influenza spillover into poultry: environmental influences and biosecurity protections

With the continued spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), understanding the complex dynamics of virus transfer at the wild – agriculture …

sciencedirect.com

All hail Anonymous Potato 🫡

Anonymous Potato@anonymouspotato.bsky.social · 12mo ago

New academic year, new ecoevojobs site. Already >200 faculty / permanent jobs! ecoevojobs.net

My feather cell type paper is finally out! doi.org/10.1111/ede.... We’ve packed a ton of stuff into this paper but I’ll go through some highlights in this thread!

Genetic Characterization of the Cell Types in Developing Feathers, and the Evolution of Feather Complexity

We used single cell sequencing to investigate the cell types of developing chicken feathers. From these data, we are able to describe the transcriptional profile of feather cell types, look at their ....

doi.org

🦩🦩🦩 First paper from my last postdoc at @tourduvalat.bsky.social, co-first authored with Hugo Cayuela, is now published in @pnas.org. Thanks to a wonderful dataset on the Greater Flamingo in southern France, we investigated the relationship between migratory behaviour and ageing. 🦩🦩🦩

Migration shapes senescence in a long-lived bird | PNAS

Each year, billions of animals migrate across the globe on diverse spatial and temporal scales. Migration behavior thus plays a fundamental role in...

pnas.org

Jim was an incredible ecologist. I own several of his books, and cite his research reguarly. www.butlernature.com/2025/08/20/j...

Jim Estes, biologist who revealed how sea otters shape entire ecosystems, died on May 20, aged 79

When Jim Estes first arrived in the Aleutian Islands in 1970, he expected a routine wildlife survey. What he found was the outline of a scientific revelation. In places where sea otters thrived, the…

butlernature.com

nice scientific writing alert -- check out the first line from this new Science paper by @gilbert-lab.bsky.social & Brent Pease "in many parts of the world, the night is no longer dark" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The latest paper from the DISCAR synthesis group is out at Ecology Letters! We discuss the key approaches to predicting human impacts on wildlife populations, highlighting avenues for incorporating indirect effects, such as energetic modelling. doi.org/10.1111/ele....

PSA: all y'all should hire Joel for your scientific illustrating needs. He's an up-and-coming artist and is great to work with!!

Joel Popp@poppbirdart.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Hooray! Congrats to you both. It was fun illustrating for this. Hope we will be working together again! #sciart #science #scicomm

First postdoc paper just dropped! Using 50 years of Breeding Bird Survey data, we found that the unexpected functional shifts of bird communities in North America do not track species-level expectations, and these unexpected shifts can be explained by just 5% of “hyper-dominant” species.

bioRxiv Ecology@biorxiv-ecology.bsky.social · last yr.

Hyper-dominant species drive unexpected functional shifts in North American birds https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.23.666479v1

Thrilled to announce that next year I will be joining @DukeBiology as an assistant professor! I am excited to recruit postdocs and PhD students to start as early as Fall 2026. If you are interested in plant community dynamics, global change, and/or wildfire, please see details below.

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/...

Hey bird postdocs! Open now: a three-year PI position with @cornellbirds.bsky.social overseeing the longterm Hubbard Brook avian monitoring program. Looking for people w/ a strong research & field background (FYI the due date is wrong—should be fixed soon) Reach out w/ questions & please share!