Common Tern Project

Screenshot of the EGI seminars You-tube Channel

We've uploaded recordings of many of our seminars over the last few months to our You-tube channel, including from @cornishjackdaws.bsky.social, Kristen Ruegg, Daniel Field, @jon-slate.bsky.social, Paul Acker, @thelabandfield.bsky.social & @kokkonut.bsky.social - Enjoy!

www.youtube.com/@EGIOxford

📢 Hiring: Tenure Track Professor of Flyway Ecology & Scientific Director of BirdEyes, the Centre for Global Ecological Change

Apply before 31 Mar 👇
werkenbij.rug.nl/vacature/ten...

#Hiring #Vacancy #ScienceJobs #SciComm

This week's EGI seminar will be given by Prof Hanna Kokko @kokkonut.bsky.social from Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz @unimainz.bsky.social on the role of time in avian trade-offs. All welcome in person in LT1 in LaMB @biology.ox.ac.uk 3.30pm on 6 March. Also live-streamed: details available ⬇️

Thanks so very much to the @dfg.de and @sfb1372.bsky.social for providing María Jesús with the opportunity to get to know us and the time to develop her PhD plans and grant application, and to ANID and the @daadworldwide.bsky.social for funding 4 further years of very important #ternscience!

The title of her PhD project will be "Plastic pollution and its ecological consequences in common terns: a longitudinal study".

I’m so over-the-moon happy to share that our lovely @mjgarciabianco.bsky.social, so far with us as a fellow funded by @sfb1372.bsky.social, will be able to continue her work in the common tern team as a PhD student, co-funded by ANID and the @daadworldwide.bsky.social.

Evaluating the demographic impacts of the highly pathogenic avian influenza panzootic Our findings demonstrate that the HPAIV panzootic can cause rapid and long-lasting impacts on the dynamics of long-lived species. This raises major concerns for the conservation and long-term viabili...

The importance of thinking of how to mitigate effects is emphasized nicely by this other new paper that uses #resilience analysis to show how HPAI outbreaks can cause rapid and long-lasting impacts on the dynamics of long-lived species:

Evaluating the effectiveness of carcass removal to mitigate highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreaks in ground‐nesting bird colonies: A modelling approach In this study, we use an individual-based model to simulate the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza in a ground-nesting seabird colony. We use this model to assess the effectiveness of carcas....

If so, this new paper suggests that daily #carcassremoval may help, as it leads to small reductions in host mortality, as well as a dramatic reduction in the environmental viral load:

With terns (and other birds) still being reported to be affected by #HPAI in their wintering areas, and the disease not having left the breeding areas either, we cannot rest assured that we won’t be facing further outbreaks in the upcoming breeding season.

DOG Annual Meeting in Mainz 2026

Join us from 16–20 September at the University of Mainz for a deep dive into life history, behavioural ecology, movement ecology and environmental endocrinology. Excursions, a public evening lecture and a GNOR symposium await.
www.do-g.de/veranstalten...

Happy Valentine's. :-)

Thank you! It's great to be part of the team! ❤️

Replication studies: a win-win for early-career training and behavioral ecology Replicating previous research builds confidence that results are real and meaningful. But close replications are rare due to limitations in resources and d

How do we know our research results are REAL? We replicate them! Most folks agree but lament on how hard it is to publish these replications.

My dearest gentle reader, lament no more! Delighted to unveil: Replication Studies, a new section of Behavioral Ecology 1/

academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...

Today we celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science by highlighting the incredible women of SFB 1372 advancing our understanding of birds, behaviour, and the natural world 🐦🔬
A small glimpse of the brilliant minds behind our research ⬇️
##WomenInScience

This #InternationalDayofWomenandGirlsinScience I would like to say a big THANK YOU to the amazing women and girls I currently have the pleasure of sharing my #ternscience journey with. Onwards and upwards we go! ❤️

Happy 40th birthday, Lower Saxony Wadden Sea National Park! May your biodiversity be safeguarded, and your birds thrive.

Thank you so much for the visit, Ben. The kindness that you and the other members of the committee brought, and the constructive questions you asked, turned a potentially stressful event into a lovely and motivating experience.

Common Tern Museum at the Bantersee

Common Tern Museum at the Bantersee

View of the ice-bound Waddensee

Profs Miriam Liedvogel & Prof Sandra Bouwhuis - brilliant leaders of the Institute of Avian Research (with some old German ornithological leaders in the background)

A richly rewarding two days reviewing @ifv-whv.bsky.social: thriving under the brilliant leadership of Sandra Bouwhuis & Miriam Liedvogel. An exciting programme of research into avian migration & life histories with many future stars. Outstanding @commonternproject.bsky.social museum by frozen sea!

It really was lots of fun to design this with Maria Röbbelen, funded by the Lower Saxonian Ministry of Science and Cultural Affairs, and with the help of my own two daughters. :-)

And to match years of the long-term study for food availability (herring abundance) and reproductive success, discussing what other sources of variation there might be.

Or to play bingo with tern names as I read out a story and thereby reconstruct the social pedigree of our colony, noticing differences in success among families, which we then discuss.

Another assignment is to complete a puzzle that displays how mercury pollution reaches the terns, and to brainstorm about what this means. Yet another one is to draw a tern and name its defining features.

We created postcards 'sent' to the kids by common terns as they travel south. The assignment is to reconstruct the routes taken, and use dates and distances to calculate travel speeds. The kids can then see how different birds go to very different places, and be impressed by distance and speed.

Proud to present: Suitcase Science, a new outreach format containing 6 assignments to take on a journey to schools in the region, to teach kids about terns, how to study them, their fascinating behaviour and some of the things that threaten them. Wanna book us? Drop me a line. :-)

NEW PAPER in #ornithology compares the responses of 200 vertebrate populations to climate change, and finds that increasing temperatures affect population growth via changes in phenology, but not morphology: buff.ly/IT66GOK

Led by Viktoriia Radchuk, an international collaboration shows phenological shifts in response to changing temperatures allow populations to remain stable or even increase in numbers.
Support from #sDiv @idiv-research.bsky.social

A selection of studied species is shown, with each inset giving information for that species on its generation time (T, in years; also depicted by the black bar next to it), its diet (carnivore: C, herbivore: H, and omnivore: O) and whether the species is a migrant (M) or a resident (R). The inset shows the number of studies per taxon and trait category. Illustration credits for the species pictures taken from Wikipedia: Svalbard reindeer—Bjørn Christian Tørrissen, four-striped grass mouse—C.R. Selvakumar, silver gull—JJ Harrison, snow petrel—Samuel Blanc, northern giant petrel—Liam Quinn, green turtle—Brocken Inaglory, green-rumped parrotlet—Jam.mohd, Columbian ground squirrel—Martin Pot, red-winged fairy-wren—John Anderson, grey-headed albatross—John Harrison. Two species pictures were provided by the co-authors of this study: painted turtle (credit: FJ) and Atlantic yellow-nosed albatross (credit: SOp). The remaining pictures were taken from Pixabay (https://pixabay.com/photos/).

In Nature Communications, our paper led by Viktoriia Radchuk shows that phenological change mediates global vertebrate responses to temperature. The study compiles 213 time series of phenotypes and population sizes, including data from Bylot. Read: urls.fr/w7ZKp9 @natcomms.nature.com 🧪🌿🌎🌐🦉🦑🦊🐻‍❄️

A huge thanks to Viktoriia Radchuk from the @ecodynizw.bsky.social for leading the work, and to all of the scientists and funding agencies supporting the long-term studies that facilitated it.

Out in @natcomms.nature.com, a collaborative paper showing that, across 73 species (including common terns), warmer years are associated with earlier phenology, and that populations in which such an association was observed have often been stable or increasing: www.nature.com/articles/s41...