Hi all,

We’re back with another update! This time we have some preliminary results from the plumage data you’ve been sending us for the past five(!) years.

One of the fairywren traits we’re interested in is year-round ornamented (bright) plumage. Fairywrens moult or replace their body feathers twice per year. Males typically moult into a dull brown, non-breeding plumage at the end of the breeding season, then moult back into their ornamented breeding plumage prior to the beginning of the next breeding season.

However, male Lovely Fairywrens keep their ornamented breeding plumage year-round and old males from other species are known to remain in ornamented plumage year-round.

 

 

Previous research from Andrew Cockburn’s group in Canberra shows that old male Superb Fairywrens can remain in ornamented plumage year-round and that early-moulting males sire more offspring than males that moult into ornamented plumage late in the non-breeding season. This suggests that females pay attention to when males moult, likely because male fairywrens begin courting females as soon as they acquire ornamented plumage. However, early-moulting males suffer disproportionate mortality over late-moulting males, suggesting that early moult into ornamented plumage is likely costly for survival.

 

A male Superb Fairywren in ornamented plumage (middle) courting a female on the viewer’s left.

 

But, while we know this year-round plumage trait can occur, we don’t know how common it is across other populations. That is where your data come in!

Our questions is: how common is year-round ornamented plumage?

To start, we’re focusing on the species we have the most data on, the Superb Fairywren.

 

 

The map above shows 20 major populations of Superb Fairywrens we’ve identified in your sightings that cover most of the species’ range.

We’ve split the first four years of your data in to four yearly periods extending from August to July, then we split each year into 15-day intervals. For example, the plot below shows the number of birds seen in 15-day intervals from August 2020 to May 2021 in the population to the southeast of Melbourne in the map above (blue dot).

 

 

Then for each of these periods, we counted how many individual Superb Fairywrens of each plumage type were reported and converted these to percentages for each 15-day period (plot below).

 

 

You can see for this population near Melbourne in March and April 2021 (days 240-284), no males in ornamented plumage were reported even though 134 Superb Fairywrens were seen over a 45-day period! This suggests that year-round ornamented plumage did not occur in this population in that year, or that it was so rare that it was not detected.

Now we’re repeating this process for all 20 populations across the species range and comparing the presence and absence of year-round ornamented plumage to weather conditions. We’ll keep you updated as we learn more. In the meantime, keep letting us know what plumage types you’re seeing!

As always, thank you for all your effort so far. We’re really excited about these data.

Joe and Allison

 

Below you'll find the newest numbers for the project:

 

 

 

 

 

 

We have big news: we're recruiting! We recently received funding from the National Science Foundation (US) and we're now looking for a PhD student to join our project. Please see the letter from Allison below:

Dai Shizuka and I are recruiting a graduate student to start in Fall 2024 on our NSF funded project on the ecogeography of social behavior in Australian birds. The student would be joining Dai’s lab at University of Nebraska-Lincoln but would be doing fieldwork with me (PI of the grant and Research Assistant Professor associated with the Shizuka Lab) on fairywrens. The deadline for applications to UNL is December 1^st, but we highly encourage the student to contact us as soon as possible so we can have a chance to correspond and potentially meet via Zoom.

The student would be engaged in studies of avian social behavior along an ecological gradient across south-eastern Australia, with the potential to additionally work on mixed-species flock studies and long-term field studies at Brookfield Conservation Park, SA. Below we’ve included a brief description of the primary intended research. Please encourage any students to email both myself (ajohnson165@unl.edu) and Dr. Shizuka (dshizuka2@unl.edu) as I’m currently in the field and may have limited ability to respond quickly.

Project Overview: 

This project develops an ecogeographic approach to understand the processes that generate both within- and across-species variation in structure of cooperative social groups across environmental gradients. We suggest that integrating ecogeographic patterns across two levels of biological organization, within and across species, will provide new information about how cooperative groups evolve. Such an approach can simultaneously address whether social systems respond to environmental gradients and why species may respond differently from one another. We will accomplish this through three aims: 1) develop a theoretical framework for understanding how environmental effects on social dynamics may generate variation in group structure across environmental gradients, 2) use a cross-continental citizen science dataset on Australian fairywrens (Aves, Maluridae) to examine ecogeographic patterns in social group size across all species and investigate how factors such as urbanization or interacting climate variables alter environment-group size relationships, and 3) conduct observational and experimental studies in two fairywren species to explicitly link disparate patterns of variation to changes in fitness and behavior. The broader impacts activities include a major citizen science platform deployed in collaboration with eBird, and professionally developed high-impact interdisciplinary lesson plans targeting middle school students.

Sincerely

Allison Johnson

Hi all,

We're a bit late in posting this. If you want these early, join our email list!

New numbers are in and we have a new paper published! On the numbers front we’re getting close to over 20,000 eBird checklists with plumage and/or group data. We just presented some analyses on these data at the annual American Ornithological Society conference earlier in August and we’ll update you with those results in our next update coming in October. In the meantime, here’s a rundown of our new paper:

 

Ecogeography of group size suggests differences in drivers of sociality among cooperatively breeding fairywrens

Photo by Sandra Gallienne via eBird (https://macaulaylibrary.org/asset/86886001)

 

Back in 2018 when Allison and I started the Fairywren Project, we decided it would be useful to supplement the continent-wide data you’re submitting through eBird with a few focused transects across an environment gradient. That led to two trips where we traveled from wet, coastal Victoria, north to dry, arid Broken Hill in New South Wales. Along the way we recorded data on group sizes and plumage types.

 

Average annual rainfall in Australia from 1989 to 2019. Points represent locations where social groups were observed. Circles are purple-backed fairywren populations and triangles are superb fairywren populations.

 

Our initial targets during the first transect in 2018 were Purple-backed Fairywrens and White-winged Fairywrens. But as we started, we ran into many Superb Fairywrens, and the White-wings turned out to be much harder to track down than we expected. They are one of our favorite species but we’re constantly amazed and often frustrated by the way a group of White-winged Fairywrens can disappear into the underbrush then reappear 50 meters away in what feels like seconds. Tracking them consistently was going to require more time than we had available.

 

Above: often the typical viewing distance for White-winged Fairywrens. Below: A bright male Purple-backed Fairywren who was more interested in foraging than in me and my camera.

 

But both Superb Fairywrens and Purple-backed Fairywrens typically let us get very close for detailed observations of plumages and group sizes. When we came back for the second transect in 2019, we focused entirely on these species. What we found was really interesting!

But first some background: Both species are cooperative breeders, meaning breeding male and female pairs are often joined by additional individuals (helpers) that assist the pair in nest defense and raising offspring. In Purple-backed Fairywrens, breeding pairs with helpers raise more offspring than pairs without helpers, suggesting helpers contribute to nesting success. But in Superb Fairywrens, helpers do not appear to influence nesting success and helping behavior appears to be driven by a lack of suitable breeding territories for young males to disperse into. When a breeding territory does open up, these helper males immediately disperse and the breeding pair can usually raise offspring just fine on their own.

Species that gain reproductive benefits from cooperative breeding, like Purple-backed Fairywrens, tend to occur in harsh, arid environments, likely due to the benefits that cooperative breeding confers when food is limited. Nestling songbirds like fairywrens are dependent on their parents to bring them food, so the more individuals feeding offspring, the more food those offspring are going to receive, and the more likely they will survive.

On the other hand, species that are primarily cooperative due to a saturation of breeding territories, like Superb Fairywrens, tend to occur in mild, wet environments. These productive environments likely have much more abundant and predictable insect prey than harsh, arid environments like the Outback, meaning helpers are not typically needed to raise offspring.

 

Left: Allison in Greater Bendigo National Park, Victoria. Right: Allison outside of Broken Hill.

 

But we know little about how species respond to environmental variation across their range. Is cooperative breeding behavior fixed within each species? Or does this behavior change in response to environmental conditions? Both Purple-backed and Superb Fairywrens experience substantial environmental variation across their ranges, with Purple-backed Fairywrens ranging over nearly all of Australia and Superb Fairywrens ranging from the eastern and south-eastern coasts all the way up to the edge of the Outback.

 

 

Our question was:

How do different environments influence cooperative breeding behavior in Purple-backed and Superb Fairywrens, and do these species respond to environmental variation in the same way?

We found that both species exhibited variation in group size across our environmental gradient, but they responded to environmental variation in different ways. Purple-backed Fairywrens exhibited small group sizes in wet habitats and large group sizes in dry habitats, whereas Superb Fairywrens showed the opposite trend. See the figure below.

 

 

These results show that a species’ cooperative breeding behavior can respond to environmental conditions and shows that how a species responds is likely shaped by the costs and benefits the species gains from cooperative breeding. For Purple-backed Fairywrens, forming large social groups with many helpers in harsh habitats is likely beneficial for nesting success when food is unpredictable. However, when they occur in wet, mild habitats where food may be more abundant, they don’t need as many helpers to raise offspring.

But Superb Fairywrens appear to mainly form large social groups in wet, mild habitats with abundant food. When we found Superb Fairywrens on the edge of the Outback, they were almost always in pairs and were widely distributed, not clumped together like on the coast, implying that young males have plenty of opportunities to disperse in those regions dominated by harsh habitats and possibly lower nesting success.

Despite the group size trend, we found pairs of both species in nearly every habitat we visited. That’s not too surprising because most fairywren helpers are offspring from previous breeding attempts, meaning large groups can only form if a pair first reproduces on their own, resulting in most populations consisting of a mix of group sizes, including many pairs.

These findings are interesting because they show that cooperative behavior can vary quite a bit within a species in response to local environmental conditions. That means that the Superb Fairywren group sizes you see in your in your garden or local park may be quite different from the group sizes that someone else sees at the other end of the species’ range. These adaptations to different environments can help us understand how species like Purple-backed Fairywrens are able to inhabit most of Australia.

We’re currently working to answer these same questions in the data you’ve been sending. For example, do Superb Fairywrens exhibit this same pattern in relation to rainfall across their entire range? Keep submitting data when you can! We will update you with some of our initial findings later this year.

And thank you for all the data you’ve submitted already! We’re creating quite a database that will be extremely valuable to understanding questions like these on a very broad scale.

Joe and Allison

Read the full paper here.

 

 

Hi all,

We’re back with another update! We have new numbers for you below and we’re hard at work investigating our first research questions using the data you’ve been submitting. We do not have any results ready to present yet, but in the meantime we thought we would provide a brief overview of a paper on Red-backed Fairywrens that Joe recently published from work completed during his PhD.

Photoperiod and rainfall are associated with seasonal shifts in social structure in a songbird:

 

 

You may have noticed in your own observations that the fairywrens near you behave differently in the spring and summer versus fall and winter seasons. Some of the reasons for these differences are obvious – in the spring and summer when fairywrens breed, they need to build nests and defend territories. These breeding territories function as a foraging area where a breeding group can find plenty of food and as a way for males to prevent other males from mating with their female.

However, in the winter, this defending of territories is often not necessary. This is especially true for Red-backed Fairywrens. While they breed primarily in pairs and sometimes have sons that help their parents at the nest, during the winter they can form large foraging flocks. Some previous reports suggest these flock sizes can get over 30 birds!

In this study, we wanted to understand when this transition from a flocking, non-breeding social structure to a territorial breeding social structure occurs, and specifically what environmental variables (such as temperature or rainfall) were associated with when this transition occurs.

My teams and I (Joe) followed groups and flocks of Red-backed Fairywrens during part of the non-breeding season (June-August) in eastern Queensland, just outside of Brisbane for four years. All of the individuals in our population at this time had color bands on their legs (see photo above), allowing us to identify unique individuals during our observations.

From these observations we were able to create a social network – a visual representation of social relationships:

 

 

Each point represents an individual bird that we followed for multiple months and the color and shape of the point conveys information on sex and status. Previous breeders are older birds who bred in the previous breeding season, while helpers and young birds are typically only 6-8 months old, having hatched in the previous breeding season. Lines connecting points show which individuals interacted with one another and thicker lines show individuals that interacted more often with one another than individuals connected by thinner lines.

Immediately by looking at the thickness of the lines you can start to identify specific social groups. Black lines connect individuals in the same social group and gray lines connect individuals in separate social groups. Our observations revealed that Red-backed Fairywrens at our field site almost always traveled in social groups and that these social groups were typically family groups composed of parents and their offspring from the previous breeding season. The dotted gray lines show larger social communities composed of social groups that interacted often.

Here's an example of what a social group can look like. I took this video just after arriving in Australia one year, so some of the birds do not have bands yet. The red-and-black (bright) individual is the male, the brown bird with the single band on each leg is the female and the other two brown birds are their two offspring from the previous breeding season.

 

 

So when you see flocks of Red-backed Fairywrens during the non-breeding season or winter, you’re likely seeing multiple social groups forming up together. Similar research from a group at Monash University indicates the same patterns occur in Superb Fairywrens down in Melbourne.

When we compared these interactions among social groups to environmental conditions, we found that rainfall is associated with interaction rates among social groups. Greater rainfall 1.5 - 2 months before an observation was associated with fewer interactions among social groups on that day. This likely means that Red-backed Fairywrens are responding physiologically to the effects of rainfall in the non-breeding season, such as greener vegetation and increased insect abundance, resulting in changes in their social behavior as they become more and more territorial as the breeding season approaches.

If you want to read the full paper you can download it here: LINK

Questions? Contact us! We’re always happy to chat: fairywrenproject@gmail.com

 

A note on data quality in your eBird observations:
Almost all of you are submitting observations that are easily interpretable and usable, but a few participants appear to be submitting plumage observations using only “male” and “female” codes. Male and female codes alone do not give us much information to work with because males can come in multiple plumage types (LINK). If you can, either use our suggested codes: bright (b), intermediate (i), dull (d), female (f), juvenile (j), or something similar that is easily interpretable for us. For example, if you say “moulting male” we know that’s an intermediate male, if you say “brown male” we know that’s a dull male.

Thanks!

Joe and Allison

 

 

Hi all,

New Fairywren Project numbers are in! We're excited to see the project continuing to grow in participant and checklist numbers. Together we're building an incredible database that will help us understand how fairywrens respond to environmental variation. Analyses are currently underway to start answering some of these questions! Below is a quick summary of the next analyses we're working on:

Group size variation across environments
We previously published a pre-print (a pre-publication version of a paper) describing our findings of group size variation in Purple-backed and Superb Fairywrens from the transects we conducted at the beginning of this project. We recently received helpful reviews back on this paper and are now preparing to re-submit it for publication. Once that's complete we'll begin asking whether we see the same trends across more species in the continental data you're submitting.

Prevalence of year-round bright plumage
Most male fairywrens exhibit two plumages per year, a bright, nuptial plumage during the breeding season and a brown, female-like plumage during the non-breeding season or winter. However, in at least a few populations of a few species, old males are known to sometimes exhibit bright breeding plumage year-round. Females pay attention to when males moult into bright plumage and tend to mate with the males that moult the earliest, so these year-round bright males may experience a big advantage to retaining this fancy plumage all year. Soon we're going to be using your data to investigate how widespread this phenomenon is that is currently only known to occur in single populations from a few species.

Until next time, happy birding! Let us know if you have any questions.

Joe and Allison

 

 

Hi all,

We’re excited to announce that our first Fairywren Project paper is out! Working with photographers and birders from around the country, we described three new instances of hybridisation in fairywrens and provided more information on a previous report.

 

This was a really fun paper to write and something we didn’t expect to work on when we started the Fairywren Project. Thanks to Martin Ross for first alerting us to one of these hybrids!

You can view/download the paper here:
https://www.birdlife.org.au/afo/index.php/afo/article/view/2254

Also check out Martin Ross and Allan Briggs’ paper on the behaviour of some of the Red-backed x Superb Fairywren hybrids:
https://www.birdlife.org.au/afo/index.php/afo/article/view/2255

And see the updated hybrid fairywrens page on our website:
https://fairywrenproject.org/hybrid-fairywrens/

Want more fairywrens? Joe talked fairywrens with Grant Williams of the Bird Emergency podcast and Dr. Holly Parsons of Birdlife Australia on the BE podcast this past Monday. You can view the recording here:
https://thebirdemergency.com/the-fairywren-project/

If you’re interested in hearing more about the hybrids, Joe will be talking with Grant and Holly again on May 30th at 12pm Melbourne time. You can livestream it or find the recording on the Bird Emergency webpage when it comes out.

Happy birding!

Joe and Allison

 

 

Hi all,

The Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC) has recently released a webinar with two fairywren experts on the breeding biology of the Purple-crowned Fairywren. Dr. Anne Peters and Dr. Nikki Teunissen have been studying Purple-crowned Fairywrens at AWC’s Mornington Wildlife Sanctuary for many years and have discovered many insights into this species’ unique behavior. This is a fun conversation and an unprecedented opportunity to learn more about this species that few people have the opportunity to see. Follow the link below to hear from Dr. Peters, Dr. Teunissen, and the AWC:

AWC webinar link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jWJ2f-wZi8&t=1s

For more on their research see Dr. Peter’s website:
https://sites.google.com/site/petersresearchgroup/our-research

Above image by Nikki Teunissen.

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!