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Abi, Sara, Ajay, Will, Peter, Georgy, and Scott recently attended the 2023 Evolution meeting in Albuquerque New Mexico. This was the first large meeting for Abi, Sara, Ajay, and Will! Sara and Ajay presented posters about their upcoming PhD work, Will gave a talk about his undergraduate work on house...

The 5th season of the Boulder Chickadee Study is in full swing with many chickadees raising young in Boulder and eggs about to hatch the higher elevation sites! One of our landowners has set up a livestream on the black-capped chickadee nest on their property. You can view it here:...

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...

The 2022 field season of the Boulder Chickadee Study has wrapped. Mia banded and bled the final mountain chickadees of the season during an outreach event at the MRS with folks from the Denver Field Ornithologists on July 10th. This field season was conducted by Mia, Will, Nikki, Olivia, Bernie,...

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...