First you go to a cute walk with your wife by the river and see some funny duck, and next thing you know 2 weeks later you're taking an online ornithology class and birding in the sleet beside 12 people who woke up at 6 AM to stand in the middle of a swamp to see a weird bird with a long neck.
They're just little guys. You can look at them for free and you can look at them up close if you pay for Bird Premium (binoculars or camera). They're just doing behaviors. They will never email you.
Post-doc opportunity in raptor conservation at The FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology in Cape Town, South Africa - with @megmurg.bsky.social and me.
South African Citizen or have a valid work visa.
science.uct.ac.za/fitzpatrick/...
#Ornithology #RaptorResearch #AfricanOrnithology
Excited to visit UToronto this week for the famous Atwood Symposium!
🦎🦎🦎
and in species with strong sexual dimorphism & female-only care. like manakins or birds of paradise etc etc - how does a manakin or bird of paradise fledgling know/learn what male manakins / bops of their species look like? especially in context of diverse assemblages
this is a superb question. how DOES a bird know what it looks like?
and one that can be extended to all sorts of organisms
April is Bird Month in the South and the students are submitting checklists with alacrity --- #1 in the state for checklists this year!
🐦⬛ April is peak bird season in Georgia, so expect to see and hear plenty of species the next time you’re on Georgia Tech's campus.
checklists flying in from campus. cool birds too - several warblers seen today were the first local records of the year!
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/... 🪶🌍
Come and join our team! With an application deadline in 1 week, we're hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Ecology in the Department of Biology at University of Windsor: efhc.fa.ca2.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...
@ibiouwindsor.bsky.social
Very proud of my incoming PhD student, Joanna Baker, for receiving the NSF GRFP! She worked extremely hard on her application and I'm very much looking forward to her joining my lab @gtsciences.bsky.social this year.
I have a personal rule that I don't criticise other academics on social media, unless there's clear and direct harm to a human being.
I'm making an except for this beautiful dumpster fire. The abstract is practically performance art.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
student vs ovenbird.
round 1 to the student
NSF LTER program “archived”.
LTER=“Long Term Ecological Research”.
This program has been incredibly successful, incredibly frugal for what they accomplish, and…of course…targeted by evil know-nothings.
My heart is breaking.
This was one of the few existing ways to find long term research. That is horrible and a huge loss to all of science. I hope other organizations and university will step up to help this important research.
Photo by Tom Murray of a male Blue-gray Gnatcatcher with a dark eyebrow puffed-up and calling. Text on the graphic says: Unsolicited Bird Fact: With their "angry" eyebrows (on breeding males) andwhiny, scolding call, Blue-gray Gnatcatchers might come off as irritable and it turns out they actually are! Despite their small size (they weighin at about 6g or ~ 6 small paper clips) these little brawlers have been recorded attacking almost 40 other species of birds, including much larger birds like robins. They will also take on chipmunks and lizards. They even steal nesting material from other birds's nests. Like Chihuahuas, Blue-gray Gnatcatchers are tiny and cute so they get away with this bad behavior. We love them anyway.
Did you ask for a bird fact? No, but you're getting one whether you like it or not. 🪶
Post Doc position alert! Come work with us on the evolution of cannibalism. Full job description in link below. Salary starts at $58k plus benefits. (Please help spread the word)
emdz.fa.us2.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...
SEAN!!!! waytogo. Sean thinks deeply and carefully about speciation, trait evolution, and how diverse communities assemble over evolutionary time. Representing @gtsciences.bsky.social
Huge huge huge and very deserved congratulations to @seananderson.bsky.social!!
Massive things to come from Sean and his group here at @gtsciences.bsky.social 🎉🎉🎉🥳🥳🥳👏👏👏
New preprint! We sequenced 175 'Alalā (Hawaiian crow) genomes to understand why >50% of eggs fail to hatch in a species recovered from just 9 individuals. What we found was a both exciting and surprising. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Have been thinking about this story all weekend – and considering how wonderfully radical it would be if millions of people took this seriously:
"Perhaps consuming a few dozen book pages a day should become the new 10,000 daily steps — a basic foundation of activity to maintain cognitive fitness."
NEW PAPER: Using almost 400,000 km of road transects, conducted over 16 years, we reveal declines in 13 species of raptor and other large terrestrial bird species across central South Africa #ornithology #AfricanOrnithology #RaptorResearch
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Photo by Wendy Miller of a Golden Eagle followed closely by a Common Raven with a photo of Shaquille O'Neal (by Bigmoe797) superimposed above the eagle. Text on the graphic says: This Common Raven heckling a Golden Eagle set up a helpful size comparison. We added Shaquille O'Neal which seemed appropriate because "aquille" comes from the Latin "aquila" meaning eagle. With a wingspan of up to 7 feet, Aquila chrysaetos (the eagle) is roughly 1 Shaquille, while Corvus corax (the raven) is about half a Shaquille. Golden Eagles are sometimes said to resemble a flying ironing board, but those are only about 4.5 feet long, and it's more fun to imagine a soaring Shaq.
When we're stuck in front of the computer for too long our bird brains go weird places. 🪶
Grad students @animalsonthemove.bsky.social (where I get to work!) made this fabulous short about navigating (literally) challenges of campus goose encounters. I <3 the combo of nerdy humour and science facts here!...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUKQ...
#western #university #campuslife #scicomm
Aging may feel gradual… but what if it’s not?
In our recent paper, we tracked fish continuously from puberty until death.
This gave us a unique view of how aging unfolds across the adult lifespan.
🧵
Heading into conference abstract / presentation season, I 100% recommend Kathryn Langin's (@kangin.bsky.social) "Tell me a story! A plea for more compelling conference presentations". It's short, sweet, and not just for ornithologists. I can get behind every word!
🔒 academic.oup.com/condor/artic...
link to official job (thumbnail says an error has occurred but it works for me, if not search for job 296047 on GT job board ):
careers.hprod.onehcm.usg.edu/psc/careers/...
We're hiring a post doc!
Looking for a global change ecologist to work with Jenny McGuire & a multidisciplinary team including me and
@jameststroud.bsky.social on the ecology side of things
please share widely!
thanks will fix and repost
