Last day to register for HNB conference in Oxford on Sept 7-9th! Looking forward to seeing lots of great talks and researchers there! 🐦

It's the last day to register for the HNB conference, don't miss out on your chance to join us in Oxford to hear about and discuss lots of cool research on hole nesting birds!🦜

Register here: oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/conferences-an…

Delighted to have contributed data to this new meta-analysis of genetic variance in fitness in wild populations led by Dr. Timothée Bonnet and including 18 other long-term popn studies. Fascinating differences between pops/spp - even for closely related (c.f. the tit pops included)

What an incredible visualisation tool the new Bird Migration Atlas from EURING is! Here's map of all European Great Tits, showing extent of movement along S edge of Baltic & isolation of UK as well as zoomed in maps for Wytham Tit Study Dept. of Animal Ecology

migrationatlas.org

600th ringed chick of the season for me this morning Wytham Woods Wytham Tit Study - with better weather than last year leading to higher brood success, it’s been a busy season!

We love that Princeton University in USA uses a Great Tit as the bird to advertise its Ecology & Evolution Scholars Program!

The State of the World’s Birds - a thread based on our new paper in Annual Reviews annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.114… 1/9

Wow! What a day... Quite a lot of coverage of our 75th anniversary & long-term response to climate change with coverage on BBC R4 BBC Radio 4 Today Breakfast BBC Breakfast Inside Science, 8 separate Radio interviews & segment for ITN News at Ten. E.g. 2h44 bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0…

#climatechange is shifting the seasons. & when you have to feed your chicks 10,000 caterpillars in just 2 weeks, timing your egg-laying perfectly is pretty important 🐦 🐛 🌳
Wytham Woods⁩ ⁦University of Oxford⁩ bbc.co.uk/news/science-e…

Wonderful to hear the work on Wytham Woods Tit Study being featured on BBC Radio 4 Today this morning. Alarming that spring is on average three weeks earlier than the 40s due to climate change. We are so proud to have such an incredible scientific resource on our doorsteps.

Some very feathery blue tits nests in the woods this year. Can you spot the bird? (Photo: Anett Kiss )

After an early start, egg laying was slow to get going thanks to a temp drop at the end of March. Warm weather in the run up to Easter moved things along - 177 females began laying within 48hrs (17-18th Apr)! We now have 552 blue & 223 great tits nests (& 2 mixed species broods!)

Of course, while we've been celebrating the anniversary we're still out collecting new data. Here you can see how nests switch to being incubated from day to day, and how this starts at the lower-altitude edges of the wood

We hope you've enjoyed a few highlights from classic studies from the 1960s to now carried out as part of this study. Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg; for full details of all 367 papers - on a really wide range of topics, check out this site
wythamtits.com/#intro

Lucy Aplin led work together with Damien Farine, Ben Sheldon and others which showed how behavioural innovations could transmit rapidly through social networks and lead to the establishment of stable cultural differences- even stable across generations!
nature.com/articles/natur…

In 2010 we started new work on how social networks arise & structure population processes. This was funded by a major #ERCAdG grant, with many people involved. We developed new methods – explained here by Lucy Aplin -for BBC Winterwatch
youtube.com/watch?v=_YTL5D…

By the late 1990s it was clear that climate change was beginning to influence the tits' behaviour. Anne Charmantier & Ben Sheldon led work showing that the population's tracking of their caterpillar food supply was accomplished by phenotypic plasticity. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…