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 …
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 …
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.
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.
Where should we draw the line between species? Biologists have debated this question for over 100 years. For much of that time, Ernst Mayr’s Biological Species Concept, which defines a species as a group of individuals that is reproductively isolated from other groups, has dominated the conversation. Recently, however, more and more evidence of hybridization between species has accumulated, especially in birds.
A number of birds that use forests disturbed by timber harvest have been declining for decades in North America’s Pacific Northwest.
