A new paper in Molecular Ecology by Conor Taff, Leonardo Campagna and Maren Vitousek explores whether patterns of methylation across the whole genome are related to variation in stress resilience in tree swallows. The paper includes the first draft genome for this species and finds differentially methylated areas associated to different predictors of stress. The direction of the methylation differences was consistent across many separate locations in the genome, suggesting that large scale regulation of hypo/hyper-methylation might be important.