News

Despite operating on a smaller scale than usual (to avoid COVID-19 spread), the second year of the Boulder Chickadee Study is going strong with almost 50 nests! Cori, master data wrangler, has managed nearly 1200 data submissions from community scientists on chickadee breeding, Kathryn is in the midst of banding...

Scott recently had the pleasure of giving one of three plenaries at the 2020 meeting of the Ontario Ecology, Ethology, and Evolution Colloquium (held virtually) hosted this year by Scott's alma mater the University of Guelph. This graduate student organized conference has been running for almost 50 years and features...

In spite of several big snowfalls in the past week, chickadee breeding in Boulder is off to a roaring start. Thanks to community scientists monitoring 118 Boulder backyard boxes, we've identified 7 newly constructed chickadee nests, 23 excavated boxes, and one complete white-breasted nuthatch nest with 2 eggs in Boulder,...

Each year the CU Boulder Office of Diversity, Equity and Community Engagement solicits nominations for Equity and Excellence Awards for faculty, staff and students. Scott was nominated by his colleagues Dr. Julian Resasco and Dr. Deane Bowers and is honored to be receiving the faculty Equity and Excellence Award for...

With this grant, Cori plans to sequence nestling fecal samples collected in the 2019 field season around Boulder to determine what insects chickadee adults are feeding their nestlings. In conjunction with insect surveys conducted around nesting boxes, this information will shed insight into how changing insect populations could affect chickadees...

Dom, Scott and collaborators Nancy Chen (U Rochester), Bob Curry (Villanova U), and Irby Lovette (Cornell Lab of Ornithology) just published a new paper on chickadee hybridization in Evolution. In this study we used temporal samples and a high-resolution genomic dataset to examine the hybrid zone between black-capped and Carolina...

It's awards and fellowships season and our grad students have had many successes! Sheela was awarded a Bernice Udick Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the CU Boulder Graduate School to finish up her dissertation on the role of behavior during speciation in recent radiations. The fellowship provides PhD candidates with one...

One of our recently funded NSF grants was just featured in Colorado Arts and Sciences magazine . This project will explore the evolution of post-zygotic reproductive isolation using hybridizing Black-Capped and Carolina chickadees as a model system. Previous studies revealed that hybrids between the two taxa suffer from physiological disfunctions...

Two weeks ago, Scott, Kathryn and Angela went to Cal-Wood Education Center to build 53 nest boxes with 4th grade students from Ryan Elementary school. This event took almost the entire day and gave students an opportunity to learn about ornithological research in general, as well as what is happening...

While most people have put their lives on hold to practice social distancing, Spring isn't slowing down--Daffodils continue stubbornly pushing to the sky & chickadees keep singing their hearts out. Maybe it's reassuring that in the midst of all this social & scientific disruption, nature is continuing forward with no...