Postdoc Scott Taylor has a new review article coming out in Trends in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology on how hybrid zones can serve as powerful windows on the ecological and evolutionary effects of climate change. Read the full paper here.
A warm welcome to Minene, who is visiting the Cornell through September and working in our lab on paternity analyses. Milene is a PhD candidate at the Universidade de Brasilia (Brazil), where her dissertation project is on the social behavior, evolution, and conservation of a (very cool! and beautiful!) endangered…
Irby just returned from the Galapagos after helping to lead the 2015 ‘Galapagos Curriculum’ for 12 Cornell freshmen, in partnership with grad students Nick Mason and Lina Arcila. As the students returned to campus, Irby stayed on to lead two very fun voyages around the archipelago for Lab of Ornithology…
Congrats to first-year grad student Stepfanie Aguillon for being awarded a research grant from the Wilson Ornithological Society in support of her exploration of the Northern Flicker hybrid zone using genomic tools.
Grad student Ben Freeman and postdoc Alexa Class are in the final week of teaching Cornell’s first-ever Advanced Tropical Ornithology course this semester to a group of juniors and seniors, including a very successful expedition to Costa Rica over Spring Break where the students conducted a series of robust independent…
David mentored the first author, a UBC undergraduate, on this project that used remote field recordings near an urban roost in Vancouver to estimate roost departure time. They found that northwestern crows seemed to maintain a semi-natural circadian rhythm in their roost departures, even with strong variation between days in…
Nick is back from Galapagos along with the 12 freshmen in our “Galapagos curriculum,” an 8-credit series of Humanities and Science courses that includes the Spring Break trip to the Galapagos. Irby carries on in Galapagos leading two back-to-back trips for Lab of Ornithology members.
Congratulations to Becca Brunner (former undergrad and more recently our jack-of-all-trades teacher, course developer, editor, etc. while also a MS student in the Webster Lab) for deciding to head west to Berkeley for her PhD studies starting this Fall!
Congratulations to Kate on finishing her last semester at Cornell with a string of successes, including an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for her forthcoming PhD studies and for being the senior selected for the CALS Academic Excellence Award in the Natural Resources major!
Irby and Nick are spending the first week of April (i.e., Spring Break) in Galapagos along with the 12 Cornell freshmen enrolled in our two-course Galapagos curriculum. Boobies, tortoises, finches, penguins, iguanas, and much more await!
A warm advance welcome to Natalie, who will be joining our lab in the Fall as an incoming PhD student. Natalie is currently completing her MS at Columbia University, where she is working with lab group alumnus Dustin Rubenstein — as far as I can recall, Natalie therefore represents our…
Congratulations to Nick Mason for winning an American Society of Naturalists Student Research Fellowship!
Congratulations to grads Stepfanie Aguillon, Jake Berv, and Nick Mason, all of whom were awarded research grants from the CALS Mellon awards program in support of their different projects.
Andy J. Boyce, Benjamin G. Freeman, Adam E. Mitchell, and Thomas E. Martin (2015) Clutch size declines with elevation in tropical birds. The Auk: April 2015, Vol. 132, No. 2, pp. 424-432. Clutch size commonly decreases with increasing elevation among temperate-zone and subtropical songbird species. Tropical songbirds typically lay small…
Nick Mason and Scott Taylor have an (I think) important new paper coming out in Molecular Ecology on the lack of genetic differentiation, but presence of gene expression differences, among redpoll finch “species.” The online-early version is here. Stay tuned for more posts on this study, complete with press releases.…
Irby and Leo will co-lead a new undergraduate seminar and field course entitled “Ecology and Conservation of Wildlife in the Neotropics” in Fall 2015. The course will meet throughout the Fall semester, and then have a two-week field learning component in wildlife-rich coastal Patagonia in January 2016. Students who want…
Congratulations to grads Stepfanie Aguillon and Jake Berv, who were both awarded significant travel grant to participate in NSF-supported workshops hosted by the Society of Systematic Biologists at this summer’s conference in Guaruja, Brazil.
Kaiser SA, Sillett TS, Risk BB, Webster MS. 2015 Experimental food supplementation reveals habitat-dependent male reproductive investment in a migratory bird. Proc. R. Soc. B 282: 20142523. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.2523 Environmental factors can shape reproductive investment strategies and influ- ence the variance in male mating success. Environmental effects on extrapair paternity have…
We are enjoying a research visit by Dr. Luciano Calderón, who is a postdoctoral fellow at Justus Liebig University (Giessen, Germany) where he works with Dr. Petra Quillfeldt. Luciano is originally from Argentina, where he did his PhD on cormorant evolution under Dr. Pablo Tubaro at the Argentine Museum of…
Mason, N. A., & Burns, K. J. (2015). The effect of habitat and body size on the evolution of vocal displays in Thraupidae (tanagers), the largest family of songbirds. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 114, 38–551