Why do migratory birds sing on their non-breeding grounds in Africa during the northern winter? It’s long been assumed that they are defending individual non-breeding territories, but by means of field experiments and radio-tracking of Willow Warblers in the field in Zambia, PhD student Marjorie Sorensen shows that the winter lives of Palaearctic-African migrants can be much more social and intriguing: read the full paper in Behavioral Ecology.
New paper on imperfect egg mimicry
Our paper “Combined measures of mimetic fidelity explain imperfect mimicry in a brood parasite-host system” has just been published in the journal Biology Letters. This study was led by Tanmay Dixit, and carried out together with Gary Choi, Salem al-Mosleh, Jess Lund, Jolyon Troscianko, Collins Moya, L Mahadevan, and Claire Spottiswoode, as part of a collaboration between our group and Prof. Mahadevan and his lab at Harvard University. Together we combined mathematical tools and field experiments in Zambia to quantify a key difference – “squiggle” markings – between the eggs of hosts (tawny-flanked prinias) and parasites (cuckoo finches). We showed that suboptimal behaviour on the part of prinias allows cuckoo finches to get by with an imperfect copy of prinia eggs.