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owl specimens
Dorsal and ventral views of specimens of the two Saw-whet Owl forms, showing plumage differences. Photos by Jack Withrow.
Guest Posts

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.

History

The Story of O(ology)

After a seminar last week, my colleague Jannice Friedman, a botanist, asked me if ‘oology’ was really a word, as it had appeared on one of the speaker’s slides. So, she asked, what is the ‘o’ that ‘ology’ (the study of) has been tacked on to? I explained to her that oology (or oölogy) is …

black-throated blue warblers in captivity
A female and male Black-throated Blue Warbler in captivity. Photo by Jessica Deakin.
Guest Posts

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.

graph from study
The greater the magnitude of nuthatch’s winter irruption, the lower the next summer’s breeding population.
Press Releases

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 their normal ranges to find enough to eat. A new study published in The Auk: Ornithological Advances uses citizen science data to show for the first time …

Guest Posts

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.

scrub-jay specimens
Devon DeRaad lines up Woodhouse’s Scrub-Jays (left) and Sumichrast’s Scrub-Jays (right) to compare back color between the forms. Photo by John McCormack.
Guest Posts

How Do Traits Change Across a Scrub-Jay Hybrid Zone?

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.

History

An Eye for Photography

In the summers of 1966 and 1967, I worked (Dream Job #2) for Bill Carrick at the Niska Waterfowl Research Station near Guelph, Ontario. Bill was an outstanding wildlife cinematographer and a superb naturalist who was director/manager of that facility. My job was to raise and feed the myriad birds and mammals that he used …

History

Ornitholojests

Most of the ornithologists that I know have a great sense of humour. My old friend and mentor, James L. Baillie often took me birding when I was a teenager and his typical response when I could not identify a big, distant bird was “You know the crow?”. At first, he was almost always right …