UV Lights on Power Lines May Help Save Sandhill Cranes
Crane species are declining around the world, and lethal collisions with power lines are an ongoing threat to many crane populations. Current techniques for marking power lines and making them …
2019 Katma Award Winners: Benjamin Winger, Giorgia Auteri, Teresa Pegan, & Brian Weeks
The American Ornithological Society’s Katma Award is intended to encourage the formulation of new ideas that could challenge long-held accepted views and possibly change the course of thinking about the biology of birds. This award, proposed and sponsored by Dr. Robert W. Storer, is to be given to the author(s) of an outstanding paper related to ornithology and published in any journal that offers unconventional ideas or innovative approaches, backed by a well-reasoned argument.
Congratulations to the 2019 Student & Postdoc Research Award Winners
AOS is proud to recognize the students and postdoctoral researchers who are receiving research funding through our 2019 Student and Postdoctoral Research Awards! These annual awards, each up to $2500, honor …
Singing Above the Urban Ruckus, If You’re a Mockingbird
Imagine having a conversation with someone next to a very busy intersection at rush hour. You can’t hear one another at a normal volume, so what do you do? You could talk louder, maybe wait for the noise to die down, or simply pick up your belongings and move to a quieter setting to converse.
2019 Painton Award Winners: Jason Carlisle, Anna Chalfoun, Kurt Smith, & Jeffrey Beck
Every two years, the American Ornithological Society bestows the Harry R. Painton Award for a paper published during the preceding two years in The Condor: Ornithological Applications that has made an exceptional contribution to ornithology.
Speciation with Gene Flow in Northern Saw-whet Owls
Scientists have long thought that for two related populations of birds to evolve into separate species, they needed to be completely separated. This usually means the kind of total separation produced by isolation on islands or by features such ice sheets, mountain ranges, or rivers. However, the complex distributions and migratory nature of many birds mean that long-term total separation of bird populations, long the assumption in speciation research, is actually not necessary for speciation to occur.
Getting to the Bottom of Male Black-Throated Blue Warblers’ Migratory Behavior
Many species of migrant songbirds have a reproductive strategy called protandry, where males arrive at stopovers and breeding sites earlier than females. Ornithologists believe that males do this because it increases their mating opportunities and reduces competition among males for high-quality nest sites. Although it’s a common phenomenon, the question of how males arrive earlier is still unanswered for most species.
Do Songbirds Pay a Price for Winter Wandering?
In years when winter conditions are especially harsh, birds that depend on conifer seeds for food are sometimes forced to leave their homes in northern forests and wander far from …
Are Homebody Warblers More Likely to Sing Together?
Scientists who want to study the evolution of behavior face a fundamental problem: unlike bones, behavior generally doesn’t fossilize. However, that doesn’t mean that extinct species’ behavior doesn’t leave any evidence. The behavior of living or “extant” species can give us clues about the behavior of their ancestors, and we can use the behavior of living species, the evolutionary relationships among species, and computational modelling to make inferences about extinct species’ behavior.
Fly Like an Eagle?
Like many people, I am fascinated by bird flight. Unlike most people, I get to study flight of Golden Eagles for a living. These large birds move through the landscape primarily by soaring—a style of flying where they hold their wings outward and rarely flap, saving them considerable energy. Instead of flapping, they rely on rising air currents to gain altitude.