Chickadee News

Congratulations to Olivia who recently defended her honors thesis! For her honors thesis Olivia studied the songs of black-capped and mountain chickadees in regions where they both occur (Boulder County, Colorado) compared to regions where they do not overlap. She found that mountain chickadees sound more different from black-capped chickadees...

Congrats to Haley and Sara who were recently awarded research grants from the Colorado Field Ornithologists! Haley will be using this funding to study the influence of color pattern differences between black-capped and mountain chickadees on aggressive interactions between them, while Sara will be using the funding to study differences...

Congratulartions to PhD student Sara Padula who is the first ever recipient of the Sarah Crump Memorial Fellowship. The fellowship was created by the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) and Sarah Crump’s family in honor of Sarah Crump (pictured here), who received her PhD from INSTAAR at the...

Congratulations to Mia who recently completed her Master's degree. Mia joined the lab in 2020 and was an integral member of the Boulder Chickadee Study over the last three years. During that time she banded over 250 chickadees and shared her knowledge of birds with numerous members of the public,...

Living Bird, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's publication, recently featured our collaborative work on chickadee spatial cognition in their Winter 2023 issue. This work is conducted with Dr. Valdimir Pravosudov, Dr. Carrie Branch, Ben Sonnenberg, and Dr. Georgy Semenov. Click the link to learn more: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/harsh-mountain-winters-have-made-chickadees-smarter/

Congrats to Kathryn and her co-authors Theresa Burg and Ken Otter for their recent paper in Global Change Biology . One of Kathryn's main thesis chapters, this paper describes the relationship between human landscape disturbance and hybridization between black-capped and mountain chickadees. Our local work with t he Boulder Chickadee...

Congratulations to the Taylor Lab graduates of 2022! From left to right, Will recieved his undergraduate degree with honors, while Dr. Grabenstein, Dr. Theodosopoulos, and Dr. Funk all had their PhD conferred. Not pictured is Cori who also recieved her undergraduate degree with honors.

Congratulations to Angela who just found out that she won a Fulbright Award for Sweden starting this fall! Angela will be using her time as a Fulbright recipient to expand on her recent discovery ( published in Biology Letters ) that the highly invasive SGS1 strain of the avian malaria...

Congrats to Olivia for being awarded a summer UROP grant! Olivia's project project aims to further our understanding of birdsong evolution by exploring whether our local canyons act as isolating barriers that facilitate song divergence between black-capped chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) populations. She will determine (1) whether canyon-isolated populations have divergent...

Congrats to Kathryn and her co-authors for their recent pulbication in Ecology and Evolution "Sympatry leads to reduced body condition in chickadees that occasionally hybridize" . Kathryn reports an interesting pattern of reduced body condition in black-capped and mountain chickadees that co-occur and discusses potential drivers (e.g., crytpic hybridization, range...