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Congrats to Erik for his recent publication in Nature Communications about an inversion supergene he disocvered in redpoll finches! Redpolls have puzzled birders and taxonomists for centuries because it is difficult to determine what "species" you're looking at. In 2015 Nick Mason and Scott published a paper in Molecular Ecology...

Starting in July 2022, the EBIO Department will be running a new NSF funded four-week field course for the incoming cohort of graduate students. The grant, led by Dr. Valerie McKenzie , will provide funding for the incoming cohort of EBIO graduate students in 2022 and 2023 to spend 4...

The product of a very fun collaboration just came out in Current Biology! Using a long term dataset of spatial cognition from a wild population of mountain chickadees in the Sierra Nevada collected by Dr. Vladimir Pravosudov , Dr. Carrie Branch , Ben Sonnenberg, and Angela Pietra, we investigated the...

The Taylor Lab recently carved pumpkins (Mia's are featured in the story thumbnail and one of Georgy's is feature here) while learning about the domestication history of pumpkins from Peter (see below!). Happy Halloween everyone! Cucurbita pepo is the most widely cultivated and polymorphic of the squash species. Pumpkins, zucchini,...

Nick Minor and Paul Dougherty (Carling Lab graduate students from the University of Wyoming) recently led a paper in Evolution exploring how we might best use eBird and other citizen science data to estimate avian hybridization in the wild. Check out the paper to read about a new approach that...

Last week the 2021 joint meeting of the American Ornithological Society and the Society of Canadian Ornithologists met virtually. Members of the Taylor Lab gave an array of talks throughout the meeting on topics ranging from redpoll (Erik Funk) and wagtail (Georgy Semenov) genomics to avian malaria (Angela Theodosopoulos) and...

We just got the official word of some new funding from NSF! The newly funded work is a collaborative grant with Valdimir Pravosudov at the University of Nevada Ren o. We'll examine the genetic basis of spatial cognition in food-caching mountain chickadees and link genetic variation to natural selection using...

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...

Earlier this week Scott was awarded the 2021 Bicentenary Medal by the Linnean Society in a virtual ceremony. The award, which comes in the form of a silver medal initially cast to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus’ death, is given to one scientist under the age...