Hope’s honors thesis is published in The Auk

Congratulations to alumna Hope Batcheller for getting her undergraduate honors thesis all the way through to publication! Hope’s project on interspecific communication among ant-following birds in lowland Amazonia started with a semester-long directed reading seminar class on the existing research about ant-following birds, when then led Hope to design field…

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Our lab group December retreat

Our lab group enjoyed an all-day retreat today, with a break to attend the Lab of Ornithology holiday party. We covered lots of ground in discussing research, outreach, and professional development topics. But perhaps the most important outcome of the sillier part of the late afternoon was the anointing of…

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Natalie Hoffmeister and Cornell team receive AAUW grant

Graduate student Natalie Hoffmeister is one of the leaders of a collaborative team from across Cornell that just received a substantial grant for a project entitled “Empowering Women in STEM to Lead through Inclusive Practice and Community Building.” After completing Cornell’s first Intergroup Dialogue course for graduate students, Natalie wanted…

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New paper on turtle dove evolution

Visiting scientist Luciano Caldarón, our own Leo Campagna, and a cadre of collaborators just published a paper showing that the European Turtle Dove shows genetic evidence of a fluctuating demography over time, and is currently undergoing a shrinking phase. The combined effect of demography, habitat destruction and hunting is causing…

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David on species limits in the Yellow-rumped Warbler complex

I’m tardy to post here that postdoc Dave Toews recently published an ornithologically quite noteworthy paper in the Auk: Ornithological Advances from his PhD work at the University of British Columbia with Darren Irwin. Their study found evidence of strongly heterogeneous genomic divergence between a number of groups in the…

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