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
Graduate student Petra Deane just got the phone call from a program officer at the National Science Foundation: her Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant was ranked very highly and has been awarded full funding! Petra worked extremely hard on crafting a compelling proposal on genomic studies of adaptation and differentiation in…
Congratuations to Nick for garnering a substantial research grant from the Sustainable Biodiversity Fund of Cornell’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future to support his work on birds in the Imperial Valley of California.
No, just postdoc David Toews looking really excited about dropping off three lanes of warbler DNAs to the core genomics facility.
Scott is just back from leading a Cornell Adult University trip to Antarctica — and making all the rest of us jealous with his photos of leopard seals, albatrosses, penguins, icebergs, whales, and spectacular scenery!
First-year graduate student Stepfanie Aguillon has a new paper coming out in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology: Aguillon, S.M. and R.A. Duckworth. 2015. Kin aggression and resource availability influence phenotype-dependent dispersal in a passerine bird. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. Abstract: Understanding the causes of dispersal is important as it strongly influences…