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2021 has been a busy and exciting year for the Boulder Chickadee Study! With COVID subsiding and vaccinations completed we've been able to operate at our normal capacity. Joining the team this summer are Mia Larrieu (PhD student), Olivia Taylor and Will Anderson (undergraduate students supported by UROP and BSI)...

Congratulations to Katherine Feldmann on the publication of her honors thesis in the Journal of Field Ornithology! Her paper quantifies plumage differences between and within black-capped and mountain chickadees and sets the stage for furthering our understanding of the role that plumage might play in hybridization between the two species...

As of June 1, 2021 Scott will be the Director of the CU Boulder Mountain Research Station (MRS) as well as a Fellow of the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR). Scott will be taking over from Dr. Bill Bowman who has been station Director for 31 years. Leading...

Mia has recently received funding from both the Denver Field Ornithologists and Colorado Field Ornithologists! She will use these grants to help set up her summer pilot project, as part of her PhD research, to explore how urbanization and elevation affects chickadee nestling development and behaviors exhibited within the nest...

Cori and Erik recently gave talks about their Denver Feild Ornithologists funded reseach to a packed virtual house with over 100 guests. Cori's first public talk, during which she detailed her findings from using DNA metabarcoding to determine what black-capped and mountain chickadees feed their young, was a smashing success...

Angela will be starting her fellowship with the Center for the Study of Origins this spring. She will be working on a project examining immune gene variation in Black-capped and Mountain Chickadees using whole genome data for both species. Through this fellowship Angela will also be working with researchers across...

Mia Larrieu, a graduate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will be joining the Taylor lab as a NSF Graduate Research Fellow and PhD student this fall. Prior to starting her PhD in our lab, Mia spent a few years as a field research assistant on some really interesting...

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...

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,...

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...