Dear friends,
We hope you're doing well despite these crazy times. With your help the Fairywren Project has reached almost 10,000 eBird checklists with plumage and/or group data! That's an incredible milestone and even more incredible to think it's only been a little over two years since we launched the project.
We're excited to announce that Joe has successfully defended his PhD, so now we're able to put a lot more time into Fairywren Project work. We currently have projects going on both group size and plumage analyses. For group sizes, we're starting to look at how group size varies with environmental conditions, similar to the transects we did in the past. For plumage, we're starting simple and investigating how common male retention of bright plumage is throughout the year. We know from single populations that males of some species can moult straight from bright to bright plumage at the end of the breeding season, but we don't know whether this phenomenon occurs in all populations across a species' range. We also have a small project brewing on hybrid fairywrens based on reports from photographers who have recently found possible hybrids in the wild. Watch for more on this soon.
Below are your new numbers. As always thank you for your help and tell your friends about the project! Your continued sightings will help us better understand these birds.
-Joe and Allison
*Do note for your plumage sightings, if you see a male, be sure to include his plumage type, not just that you saw a male. Since males can come in multiple plumage types (bright, intermediate, or dull), it's hard for us to know which type you mean when we only see "1 male" written. Thanks!
