News

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 Haley and Ajay who have been awarded Research, Education & Conservation grants from the Denver Field Ornithologists! Ajay will be using his award to further investigate the geographic consistency of the genetic basis of spatial cognition in mountain chickadee populations of the Colorado Rocky Mountains and the California...

Congratulations to first year PhD students Sara Padula and Nikki Addison for being awarded a $10,000 grant from Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks (OSMP) to conduct a passive recording field study. The project is entitled "The effect of anthropogenic noise on songbirds on OSMP land." Field work for 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,...

The Taylor Lab welcomes Dr. Jay Falk, an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow joining the lab this month. Jay studies the evolution of sex differences and similarities, and is broadly interested in how social interaction leads to biodiversity both within and across species. With hummingbirds as a model taxa, Jay uses an...

Congrats to Angela and Colleagues for their article recently accepted to the journal Parasites and Vectors . The article titled “Survey of Haemosporidian Parasite Infections in an Endangered High Alpine Bird,” is an exploration of haemosporidian parasites that infect Brown-capped Rosy Finches. The Brown-capped Rosy Finch is a nearly endemic...

Congrats to Erik and his colleagues! The final chapter of Erik's PhD thesis was recently accepted for publication in Evolution . Erik's manuscript explores genotype-phenotype associations for plumage color and elevation in rosy finches and highlights several candiate genes for both. Given their recent diversification and the independent nature of...

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...