Souped-up sexual selection gets the headlines but I'm always drawn to year-round territorial species with strong social bonds, like this pair of White-shouldered Fairy-wrens. A New Guinea version of the antbirds I used to study in Peru, with strikingly similar ecological niche and duetting behaviour

Also a pilgrimage to the bower of a Vogelkop Bowerbird. A mind-boggling monument to the transfer hypothesis. A plain bird with a boring voice, concentrating all its efforts into attracting sexual partners with construction skills and luxury possessions (including, in this case, a toy sportscar 😂)

The male is a pretty mad thing to look at in any case, with a quiver of filaments adorning its head and a forehead tuft that changes from black to shining white in an instant

Back from couple weeks in West Papua enjoying mind blowing sights like this practise display from a male Western Parotia. It’s bizarre ballerina dance with perfectly circular shadow on a pristine dancefloor was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen in real life.

Yes indeedy!

Early Sunday morning worship on Waigeo. Best bird in the world? Certainly one of the most incredible to watch.

My lifelong Paradisaeidae drought comes to a welcome end. A pilgrimage to West Papua starts out with twelve-wired bird-of-paradise (!)

Visited the coast near Fuzhou to look for Chinese Crested Tern. Hit the jackpot at high tide. Maybe only a couple hundred of these surviving: one of the world’s rarest birds

Oroanassa magnifica - White-eared Night-heron. Incredible views after a long nocturnal search on a beautiful warm night in Fujian, China. Life is good!

After dipping it at the exact same spot with @robsrw.bsky.social and others in 1993 it was great to return with my son Luca and finish the job 🎉

Ramphocoris clotbey. The world's best lark. Don't care what anyone says. Dipped it in 3 different countries, the first after a high speed dash across the Negev with Hadoram Shirihai 38 years ago. Finally caught up with it on the Tagdilt Track in Morocco this week. Blazing views. Joy of joys.

...when I came across this image (on wikiaves) taken in Brazil. Not only is the nest largely composed of rhizomorphs but the nestling is CAMOUFLAGED TO LOOK LIKE THEM! 😍 2/5

🚨 Bulbul project update: we are now measuring specimens in several collections in Asia, Europe and USA. The data will be used in a family-wide analysis of intraspecific variation and are destined for the next global dataset release (AVONET 2.0). If you want to join the project, get in touch. 🪶🌐🌎🧪

@mschleuning.bsky.social kicks off our workshop linking plant and animal traits to ecosystem-level processes, in Frankfurt today. 🪶🍁🌐

One of the highlights of a short trip to Yunnan last week – the Spot-breasted Parrotbill: an icon for functional morphologists, an insectivore with the 'wrong' beak (stubby like a seed-eater) which nonetheless makes ecophysical sense because it uses bite-force to snip through grass/bamboo stems

Absolute scenes in Yunnan when this happened today

A long and busy week ended on a high yesterday. So proud of Dr @jyang19.bsky.social for sailing through her PhD viva, the final step of a long journey in my lab from a Silwood masters degree to a doctorate. 💪 Big thanks to Profs Cris Banks-Leite and Gavin Thomas for examining.

A heads-up for anyone interested in research quality, repeatability & transparency: I'm leading a 2-hour session at 10 am UK-time tomorrow, in conjunction with others. Hopefully this can form the basis of a guidelines paper, so we're hoping you can join online to guide us in the right direction. 🌐🌎

Still major confusion about that one. My eBird calls them American Black Vulture and Black Vulture (not Cinereous), but BoW uses Black Vulture differently. This may be one that you can set according to your preference 😅

To complete this scintillating little set, a Beautiful Hummingbird and a Lucifer Hummingbird ... two very closely related Mexican hummers seen in Oaxaca and Mexico City, respectively. #BirdsSeenIn2025

This lil' beauty is tricky to find, at least this time of year: Bumblebee Hummingbird in Oaxaca this morning.

Finally got round to cataloguing bird images from South Africa fieldtrip in January, including Drakensberg mountains, Mpumalanga grasslands and the Flock to Marion cruise. Now I'm missing the ocean. Photos & trip report here: ebird.org/tripreport/3...

Full photo-trip report here: ebird.org/tripreport/3... 2/2

Saudi Arabia trip report online: 138 species photographed, including Saunders's Tern. Most of us had scratched this species off our lists following new information on the challenge of identifying wintering birds, so it was great fun tracking down a breeding plumage adult on the Farasans 1/2

Heads-up for fans of trait-based models & trophic interactions! A fresh & fruity paper led superbly by Andressa Cabral & Renske Onstein @naturalis.bsky.social investigates the role of seed-dispersing animals in shaping pantropical plant diversity. nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

This study was led by Brian Weeks @umich.edu and based on measurements of wing bones of ~1500 passerine bird species! @sheardcat.bsky.social (4/4)

Another unexpected angle on bird wing evolution: skeletal measurements suggest that wing bone length is shaped not only by aerodynamics of flight but also by thermoregulation (1/4) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #macroecology #ornithology 🧪🌎🌐🪶

I assume you're not on X and I don't want to link to there, but that was exactly my response on July 13 2022:

Also, it's Friday night, so pour one out for the old days of science Twitter, where discussions of bird wings could give rise to research projects. Those days are gone. Long live science bluesky! @nomadbirder.bsky.social

Forgot to add! When you upload the image you can tick one or both checkboxes: "Foraging or eating" and "Carrying food" This helps researchers to locate relevant images. Food-photography adds a new dimension to birding as it's a fun challenge getting shots of any species carrying food.