Every Thursday afternoon, we prepare window-collision birds for the museum, but my labmate Teresa suggested we use Halloween as an excuse to work on some owls today. And here’s what we found — a full stomach of caterpillars in a Barred Owl salvaged in December in Massachusetts!

Incorporating the full annual cycle when studying reproductive isolation and speciation | doi.org/10.1002/jav.... | Journal of Avian Biology | #ornithology 🪶

Thirteen juvenile Cedar Waxwings died from window collisions at @umassamherst.bsky.social ’s Isenberg School of Management over the past three weeks, including eight that were found together on October 2. We are training undergraduate students to prepare them as study skins for the museum.

This is the fourth Belted Kingfisher that has hit windows on the @umassamherst.bsky.social campus since July 2024… Two classes (Population Ecology and Global Change Ecology) are conducting daily surveys of 21 buildings to document these collisions this semester.

Direct human actions such as hunting and bird deterrence at aquaculture sites kill up to 10% of the populations of some shorebird species migrating along China’s coast each year, suggesting that this direct mortality is an overlooked threat to migratory populations 🧪

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Finally have an excuse to add the Saint Louis Zoo to the map! #AOS2025

1/Lots going on from the Senner Lab and the @umassamherst.bsky.social community at #AOS2025! @feipenghuang.bsky.social gets the ball rolling with Poster #13 on Tuesday evening. He will be presenting on how Hudsonian Godwit chicks (try to) avoid predators in space and time.

1/Spring bird migration is getting earlier, right? Not necessarily! In our latest paper, led by former lab MSc student Lauren Puleo, we found that a population of Hudsonian Godwits breeding in Alaska is now arriving 6 days later than they were a decade ago. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Banding the last chicks of the season was bittersweet - in the rapidly progressing sub-Arctic summer, they will never be able to catch up with the chicks that hatched more “on time”. The earliest are already over two weeks old.

Banding Short-billed Dowitchers this season. Some of the chicks have pretty stylish legs!

Hard to believe, but this Hudsonian Godwit was banded as an adult in 2012 and evaded detection for the past 12 years! We found her paired with a male who has had successful nests over the past three years!

Magical moment with these Pectoral Sandpipers. They use the bog as a stopover.

First day back in the field and could not wait to hit the flats to see who’s back! These birds are in great shape!

At the end of last year, we had a flurry of accepted manuscripts that are going to be published over the next weeks. The first one is already out. Those tiny #Ruff 🐥 have personalities - wonderful work by Veronika Rohr published in Ethology doi.org/10.1111/eth.... 🧵 (1/7)