Paul Dufour

Letter to the editor concerning the paper “Attraction points: A new sampling design method to quantify common finches' populations” published by Marazuela Pinela et al. in Ecological Indicators, 171, ...

New 'letter to the editor' criticising a previous paper published in Ecological Indicators is well worth a read: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Includes this quote 'At least two of them (Marazuela Pinela and López Espí) are self-proclaimed silvestristas—the Spanish term for songbird trappers'

Apparent Bonapartes × Blackheaded Gull I found in Cork City 31/12/25

Ross's Gull

I don't often twitch long-distance anymore, but with 3 dips over nearly 30 yrs, Ross's Gull was up there as most wanted. And being a first winter, its even more special to the ID aficionados. Just a few 1000 pics to go through... #RareBirdsUK

I never knew Wallcreeper ate Reptiles! Today I watched this Bird take a small Lizard from the Rockface and devour it. #birding #wallcreeper

🚨New preprint out @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social (under review elsewhere!) 🧵

No global collapse of food webs across the Permian–Triassic Mass Extinction (PTME)

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Absolutely insane story about a middle-aged woman from Hertfordshire who got arrested, shackled, and detained by ICE and held in a prison for eight weeks.... while on holiday... with a valid tourist visa... as she tried to leave the country.

NEW JOB in #ornithology chasing #nutcrackers in Switzerland to understand seed dispersal patterns: buff.ly/Cx0OOQy

Our Belgian chiffchaff recovery is back! 🪶💍

It was ringed on 10th October 2025 in Liège, Belgium, and was re-trapped on 8th December 2025 in Cheshire, UK (669km movement). A small insight into where UK wintering chiffchaffs may breed (although it was likely ringed on migration). #ornithology

Amazing story of a moth once thought extinct being recorded in the wild after 150 years!

This story shows the power of platforms like #inaturalist and the value of a #bioblitz, with this moth recorded during the Great Southern BioBlitz 2021 @gsbioblitz.bsky.social

#mothsmatter #inverts #bugsky

A melanistic Lapwing seen at #RSPBGreylake #Somerset last week. It was very aggressive to any other Lapwing that came to close.

#somersetbirding @somersetbirds.bsky.social

Birds That Don't Exist: Niche Pre‐Emption as a Constraint on Morphological Evolution in the Passeroidea We use topological data analysis to reveal a persistent morphological gap in a major group of songbirds (superfamily Passeroidea). The gap remained unoccupied for millions of years, even though nearb...

Birds That Don't Exist: Niche Pre‐Emption as a Constraint on Morphological Evolution in the Passeroidea - Chia - 2026 - Ecology Letters - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

eBird Checklist - 2 Feb 2026 - Guéra, TD (12,176, 18,786) - 38 species Submitted by Pierre Defos du Rau.

So this is an exciting rediscovery
www.birdguides.com/news/rusty-b... and
ebird.org/checklist/S2...

I visited Grenada some weeks ago, and was very surprised to see the (small) area completely open, with lots of stray dogs and people walking their dogs off leash… a bit worrying. Fingers crossed for the future!

why do males defend territories in some species while pairs or family groups defend territories in others?

then-undergrad Shreyas Arashanapalli did a fantastic project to find out, analyzing 3177 playback experiments on 264 species

the best predictor?

latitude

academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

There are few Baikal Teal (Sibirionetta formosa 花脸鸭 Huāliǎn yā) wintering at the Yellow River estuary in Shandong Province. Photo by "菜小hua". #birds #china #yellowriver

A climate-mediated ecological cascade leads to salmonellosis outbreaks in the United States. Temperature differences in successive summers are associated with differences in tree cone production in high-elevation and high-latitude forests (Top row), such that a warm summer followed by a cold summer is associated with a drop in cone production the following year (Top Right panel). Cone production is negatively associated with facultative bird migrations (irruptions) of eight seed-eating species (Middle row), such that when cone numbers are low, birds are more likely to irrupt in large numbers (Middle row, Right panel). When irruptions of pine siskins (S. pinus) occur, more songbirds are often found infected with, or dead from, salmonellosis (Bottom Right panel).

New paper links Salmonellosis disease dynamics to avian irruptions mediated by transmission at bird feeders - with subsequent spillover to humans causing severe illness and death 🪶🌎 #ornithology #UKBirding
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #BirdFeeding #Rethink @mwtingley.bsky.social

Front cover of issue 6 2025: Photo of a common snipe featuring the article 'Effect of low-traffic roads on abundanceof ground-nesting birds in sub-Arctic habitats' by Pálsdóttir et al. Photo credit: Tómas G. Gunnarsson.

All the best for 2026 to all our authors, readers and reviewers

In case you have missed it and need a weekend reading: issue 6 of 2025 is closed. Full issue ⬇️

vist.ly/4n6me

Cover credit: Tómas G. Gunnarsson, featuring Pálsdóttir et al ⬇️ vist.ly/4n6mg

#ornithology #birds #science

Several male Surf Scoters swimming in a line. These scoters are recognizable by their large, brightly coloured beaks of red, orange white and black. The adult male also has a large white spot on its forehead and the back of its neck (not visible in this shot).

Feeling unusually organized today, NOT, but I do have all my ducks in a row!
Surf Scoter, Dipper Harbour, #NewBrunswick, #Canada
#birds #nature #wildlife #birdphotography

🚨 PhD offer (please share)
Fascinated by bird migration and movement ecology? 🦜🌍 Join us at @vogelwarte.bsky.social to study annual cycle energetics with multi-sensor loggers in multiple species

Deadline: 20 Feb 2026
Starting: June 2026
Supervision: Martins Briedis & me

Info: tinyurl.com/2dbv9nzh

Quantifying the unrecorded loss of avian phylogenetic diversity Humans have drastically reduced avian diversity, with the majority of extinctions occurring on islands. Previous studies have quantified various aspects of this decline, including both taxonomic and ...

🚨 New paper out in @ecography.bsky.social ! 📝

Led by Dr. Søren Faurby, we built upon the estimated unrecorded bird extinctions by @r-cooke.bsky.social et al. 2023 and try to estimate the corresponding unrecorded loss of phylogenetic diversity. 🦤🧬

Check the full paper here:
doi.org/10.1002/ecog...

Christmas can be an expensive time of year, so how about something for free?

The @scottishbirding.bsky.social and Scottish Birds Records Committee are hosting a FREE online conference over the evenings of February 24th to the 26th. Three talks per night and some real belters among them.

Swiss Breeding Bird Monitoring dataset is now openly accessible! The team from @vogelwarte.bsky.social made the long-term dataset of the Swiss CBM program (“Monitoring Häufige Brutvögel”, MHB) freely available under CC-BY 4.0 licence. esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

The use of multi-sensor loggers is transforming our understanding of small-bird migration, despite the continuing difficulty of tag recovery. Although sample sizes remain small for many species, expanding these multi-species datasets promises exciting discoveries ahead 5/5
@vogelwarte.bsky.social

Over marine areas, the story flips: birds usually fly much lower and some descend even lower during daytime 4/

These strategies seem tightly linked to wing morphology, structure and plumage. For ex, species with shorter wing bones and darker plumage tended to ascend higher during daytime desert crossings, likely benefiting from cooler air, better heat dissipation, and reduced solar heating 3/

Among the cool behaviors we observed above the Sahara: Scops Owls, Spotted Fly and Common Redstarts were found prolonging their flights during daytime at altitudes close to 5,000m, and Whinchats commonly completed 45h nonstop flights at similar heights. See flight profiles in Supmat figures 2/

Happy to share our new paper published in @cp-iscience.bsky.social We deployed 300+ multi-sensor loggers across 17 species to investigate how different species adapt their flight strategies when crossing deserts and marine areas during migration. tinyurl.com/2c8y8xvf #ornithology #birds

A thread on our latest publication – a publication we worked > 10 years on. 🙃 This project has driven us mad at times. But in the end, it has made it onto the cover of tomorrow’s issue of @ScienceMagazine, so I suppose it was worth it... 😅 1/

These are the relevant morphometrics to measure on a flycatcher. Although absolute measurements are very helpful, relative metrics, essentially proportions, are just as useful. These are the features that can be measured from photos or what you see, with some training, in the field.

New paper out! 🐦📊

We realease AVONICHE, a global dataset with detailed information on the proportional use of 32 foraging niches, combining dietary categories with the behaviours and substrates used to access resources.

Openly access the paper and data in GEB: doi.org/10.1111/geb....