Day 68 of the 47th # Gotland season! After some May showers Gotland returned with dazzling sunny weather :) first flycatchers started to hatch, but this years weird. The blue tit population was hit hard by blåmessjuka („blue tit disease”) caused by Corynebacteria - Suttonella ornithocola.
Hej Blåmes! Gotland's long-term bird monitoring
@hejblames.bsky.social
We are the ~50-year-old avian ecology project started in 1979 on the island Gotland 🇵🇱🇸🇪🪺. Every year we follow several hundred breeding pairs of blue tits and collared flycatchers in our nest boxes. Follow us for news and related winged miscellany.
Day 49: the season is ramping up really slowly… Tits started laying eggs very late and in two bouts (below blue tit data) and flycatchers - well, they started on the 11th but then most females decided to wait ;)
Day 22 of the 26th Gotland season! We started on the 14th of April - it’s a surprisingly odd spring here in #Gotland. Exceptionally early arrivals of warblers (chiffchaff, willow warbler and blackcap already gear on the 18th) and exceptionally late for hole nesters (it’s past the 20th and we have
We’re at @hnbirds2025.bsky.social in Olomouc :) tits rule the talks so far - second photo = @szymekdr.bsky.social presenting work on blue tits and steroid hormones.
With #eseb2025 coming to a close, it is time to start making plans for 2026. Interested in the interface of evolution 🧬 and ecology 🌳? Come to our #ExE conference hosted by @uniexecec.bsky.social in beautiful #Cornwall. Leave your email address at tinyurl.com/EvolxEcol to join our mailing list!
It's been a busy summer for our scientists. Several of them attended the #ESEB2025 conference in Barcelona.
Another paper from the lab, this time using very long time series of our flycatcher data.
Our recent paper now live in Frontiers in Zoology @springernature.com - we show how climatic trends affect reproductive success of flycatchers in the Gotland population (nearing 50 yrs of continued monitoring ;)) link.springer.com/article/10.1... @ioes-ju.bsky.social @jagiellonskiuni.bsky.social
📢Nowe zasady open access w NCN: większa elastyczność – ta sama idea. ❗️Z dniem 26 czerwca odeszliśmy od wymogu publikowania wyłącznie w otwartym dostępie, jednak nadal rekomendujemy otwarte udostępnianie wyników badań. Szczegóły➡ ncn.gov.pl/aktualnosci/... #openaccess #projektyncn
Not much, just the usual Swedish Midsommar WEATHER DISASTER 🫣 stormy winds, cold showers and apparent temp close to 5 degrees C. Luckily most of our flycatcher broods managed to fledge, fingers crossed for all of them to make out of the island in August;)
Trevlig midsommar ;)
It takes some getting used to moving from Twitter do Bsky ;) we will provide more updates next year, promise ;) in the meantime - I well overdue update from the 46th Gotland field season :) a very early season (a record-early flycatcher first egg from the 4th of May), and a very mixed one
#gotland #fieldwork Day 32: it seems our blue tits finally saw the feathers we left for them to choose from. This one used a lovely set of white (not ours) feathers with an eclectic set of blue peacock feathers :)
Stay away from the vortex ;) #fieldwork day 19th during the 2025 season of the #gotland bird project :)
We’re piloting a new study - looking at aesthetic tastes of blue tits, and possibly visual style copying behaviour. Today we distributed artificial bird bodies (mimicking the usual source of feathers for BTs - dead birds and leftover feathers). We used feathers of peacocks, Japanese quails and
We are starting our new season #gotland2025 - with warm weather, birds already starting first nests, and a visit to a changed Fide Odvalds plot (see photo: they cut down some of the densest parts, in efforts (as I was told) to eradicate invasive Rubus species…). The highlight of today:
Registration is now open for the Hole-nesting Birds Conference 2025! Researchers of all career stages are warmly invited to join us in the historic city of Olomouc, Czechia. #ornithology [Link to register: registrace.rapl.upol.cz/Form/HoleNes...
Our lab on @nature.com cover :)
The latest issue of @nature.com sports a charismatic cover image ooooof... A frog! :) our recent paper on amphibians and the ways global climate change is bound to affect them (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) found its way to the cover of Nature. 💜💚🐸
Not quite as burst as we usually do it, but this massive comparative analysis of amphibians, with some of us among its authors, was just published by @nature.com !:)
@nature.com has just published online our new paper!🎉🐸🌡️Lead by @patricepottier.bsky.social and supervised by myself and @itchyshin.bsky.social: in this massive research effort we overcome several common convictions related to the topics we studied. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Here are take-homes.
We're moving out of Twitter (tbh honest tits and collards never did much of any "tweet-tweet" chirping ;)) Follow us for news from the field, Gotland trivia and kuriåsa, recent papers and events - and more. Reach out if you're interested in collaborating, visiting Gotland and ouir birds or just