Out & About: News from the Winger Lab
October 2023: New paper shows impacts of "space weather" on migratory birds
Congratulations to PhD candidate Eric Gulson-Castillo for his highly novel new paper that demonstrates a link between space weather (e.g., coronal mass ejections) and disruptions to bird migration at a continental scale. This paper is the culmination a collaboration we began several years ago with space scientists in UM's Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering department, as well as statisticians and radar ecologists. Read the press release here.
Media coverage includes this feature on the Weather Channel, Scientific American, and Newsweek.
Media coverage includes this feature on the Weather Channel, Scientific American, and Newsweek.
August 2023: American Ornithological Society meeting!
Our lab had a great presence at the American Ornithological Society meeting in London, Ontario, with four talks and two posters!
June 2023: Teaching and new research at the UM Biological Station
Ben and postdoctoral fellow Abby Kimmitt co-taught the Biology of Birds at the UM Biological Station, with help from teaching assistant Ben Hack. This is one of the longest running field ornithology classes in the country and we had a great time exploring the varied and bird-rich habitats of northern Michigan. Alongside this course, PhD candidate Matt Hack began a project using geolocators to better understand the migratory patterns and annual cycle timing of several locally breeding songbird species.
June 2023: Talks and awards at Evolution Meetings
Lab members Teresa Pegan and Kristen Wacker presented their PhD dissertation research at the Evolution Meetings in Albuquerque, NM, and PhD student Matt Hack received the R. C. Lewontin Early Award from the Society for the Study of Evolution!
May 2023: Dr. Teresa Pegan defends dissertation!
CONGRATULATIONS to Dr. Teresa Pegan for successfully defending her PhD dissertation! Teresa gave an outstanding exit seminar about her expansive and groundbreaking body of research on the comparative evolutionary and spatial genomics of migratory birds. Luckily for us, Teresa will continue on in the lab as a postdoc for the upcoming year, so we don't need to say goodbye yet. Here's Teresa (center) and her committee (Dan Rabosky, Andy Marshall, Ben Winger, Lacey Knowles).
May 2023: New paper on the rate of contemporary body size change in birds
Our new research on the dynamics of contemporary body size change in birds shows that smaller species are changing in body size faster than larger species. The mechanisms underlying this pattern require more research, but we reveal a compelling pattern across two independent datasets. Read more here. Photo © Field Museum, Daryl Coldren.
January 2023: New paper on demographic history of migratory boreal birds
Congratulations to lead authors Abby Kimmitt and Teresa Pegan on our lab's new paper exploring the demographic history of boreal migratory birds through the Pleistocene. Using mitochondrial genomes from the large whole genome dataset of boreal-breeding migratory birds that we have been building, we found that populations of most species expanded during the Pleistocene, but earlier than often thought. This work represents the first of several forthcoming papers on the evolutionary dynamics of boreal migratory birds, supported by our NSF grant.
January 2023: New collaborative paper extends research on speciation in Andean cloud forest birds
We published a collaborative new paper that builds on Ben's PhD dissertation research on the dynamics of speciation of Andean cloud forest birds, focusing on divergence across the Marañón Valley in Peru. Ben previously showed that divergence of plumage traits in this system was clock-like in tempo, whereas the tempo of morphological divergence is more idiosyncratic. Here, we expand these insights by considering a larger set of species and using playback experiments to study vocal divergence in greater detail.
July 2022: Hann Lecture at UMBS
Ben was honored to give the Hann Endowed Lecture in Ornithology at the University of Michigan Biological Station. There's hardly a better setting to give an evening talk then on the shores of Douglas Lake.
June 2022: AOS Brina C. Kessel Award
Ben and Teresa were honored to receive the American Ornithological Society's Brina C. Kessel Award for our paper "Migration distance is a fundamental axis of the slow-fast continuum of life history in boreal birds. Ornithology 138:1-18" The award honors a paper published in the journal Ornithology over the past two years. Read more about the award and paper here.
June 2022: Summer Meetings
The Winger Lab had five students give presentations at the American Ornithological Society and Birds Caribbean 2022 conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and we had three presentations at the Evolution Meetings in Cleveland, OH. Here's our crew in Puerto Rico!
June 2022: Big news from the National Science Foundation!
Our work on the evolutionary dynamics of seasonal migration in boreal birds was awarded a major grant from the National Science Foundation! This award for $770,868 will provide three years of support to our lab. It focuses on using genomic tools and migration tracking tags to test how seasonal migration influences dispersal, gene flow and population connectivity. Our study system is a suite of North American boreal-breeding bird species that winter throughout the Americas. For the past decade, we have been working in the field across Canada and the Great Lakes states to build genomic and museum specimen resources for the comparative research that will be supported by this grant.
Spring 2022: PhD student research grant awards from SICB, SSB, AMNH, BOU and AOS!
We worked hard as a group this year on student 'small grant' applications, and it's been great to see several awarded recently. Congratulations to Eric Gulson-Castillo for winning a Grant in Aid of Research from the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, to Kristen Wacker for receiving the Alexander Wetmore Award from the American Ornithological Society and a Graduate Student Research Award from the Society of Systematic Biologists, to Kristen and Teresa Pegan for winning student research grants from the British Ornithologists' Union, and to Eric, Kristen and Teresa Pegan for all receiving American Museum of Natural History Chapman grants in support of their work!
A huge thank you to all of these organizations for your support of our group's work!
A huge thank you to all of these organizations for your support of our group's work!
April 2022: ESA George Mercer Award
Our lab's paper on changing bird morphology won the 2022 George Mercer Award from the Ecological Society of America! The Mercer Award is given "for an outstanding ecological research paper published by a younger researcher ". The paper's first author was Winger Lab postdoc Brian Weeks (now Assistant Professor in UM SEAS).
April 2022: Research featured in Science news article on bird collisions
Our 2021 paper on the impact of artificial light on bird collisions in Chicago was among those featured in this recent news article in Science on data-driven efforts to mitigate the effects of artificial light on migratory birds.
April 2022: Audubon article on evolution of migration
Ben was interviewed for an article in Audubon on the evolution of bird migration.
November 2021: Climate change research in the news
In 2020, we published research showing that many species of North American migratory birds have become smaller over the last 40 years, while, surprisingly, their wings have become longer. A new study published this month by colleagues at Louisiana State University demonstrated very similar patterns in birds found in Amazonian Brazil. Together, these and other recent studies suggest that the impacts of climate change on animal morphology are widespread. Ben spoke to Smithsonian Magazine and Science News about this work, and collaborator Brian Weeks spoke to NPR.
October 2021: Magnetoreception research
Earlier this year, we launched a new project on the evolutionary dynamics of magnetoreception in migratory birds. Magnetoreception is one of the greatest mysteries in animal biology. We seek to understand whether different species of migratory birds have evolved different ways of perceiving and processing geomagnetic information to achieve their long-distance migrations. Here, PhD students Eric Gulson-Castillo (Winger Lab) and Corinna Langebrake (visiting Michigan from the lab of collaborator Dr. Miriam Liedvogel in Germany) set up an Emlen funnel experiment in a magnetic coil system.
September 2021: Smithsonian Magazine Interview
Ben spoke to the Smithsonian Magazine about recent research on how animals are changing in size and shape in response to global warming.
September 2021: Postdoc transitions
We are excited to welcome Dr. Abby Kimmitt as a new postdoc in our lab. Abby will be using comparative genomics to study the population histories and evolutionary dynamics of boreal birds.
Congratulations and best wishes to Dr. Marketa Zimova for moving on to a tenure track faculty position at Appalachian State University! For the past two years Marketa has been a postdoctoral fellow in UM's Institute for Global Change Biology, co-advised by Ben and Brian Weeks.
Congratulations and best wishes to Dr. Marketa Zimova for moving on to a tenure track faculty position at Appalachian State University! For the past two years Marketa has been a postdoctoral fellow in UM's Institute for Global Change Biology, co-advised by Ben and Brian Weeks.
August 2021: AOS Meeting!
The Winger Lab had a strong presence at the 2021 American Ornithological Society's (virtual) meeting, with talks by Ben (on the evolution of seasonal migration and life history), PhD student Teresa Pegan (on the influence of seasonal migration on molecular evolution) and PhD student Eric Gulson-Castillo (on the influence of space weather magnetic disturbances on bird migration). Congrats to Teresa for receiving an Honorable Mention for the student talk awards!
July 2021: Detroit Free Press Interview
Michigan's first state record Roseate Spoonbill near Ann Arbor caused a lot of excitement this summer. We enjoyed seeing it, and Ben was interviewed about the rare bird and the causes of avian vagrancy in the Detroit Free Press.
July 2021: New paper in Ornithology
Ben and Teresa published a new paper in Ornithology showing the migration distance of birds influences and is influenced by fundamental life history tradeoffs. Read more about it at in this blog piece.
June 2021: A much needed return to the field!
After COVID-19 cancelled our field plans in 2020, it was wonderful to get back into the field with our UMMZ Bird Division group. We continued our research on boreal birds in northern Michigan for several projects on the evolutionary dynamics of seasonal migration. Fly-in on for a bird's-eye-view of our field crew at the University of Michigan Biological Station. L-R Eric Gulson-Castillo, Teresa Pegan, Shane DuBay, Vera Ting, Ben Winger, Kristen Wacker, Susanna Campbell, Brian Weeks and Brett Benz.
June 2021: Our new papers draw media coverage and attention to bird building collisions
Two new papers from the lab were published this month and garnered notable media attention:
The first, led by Cornell postdoc Benjamin Van Doren, was in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and represents an important step forward in our understanding of how artificial light drives fatal bird building collisions during migration -- and what we can do about it. This paper builds on a previous Winger lab paper on the relationship between artificial light and building collisions in migratory birds. Read more about the new paper here. This research was featured on the front page of the Chicago Tribune and the focus of a Chicago Tribune Editorial Board piece calling to reduce building lighting to save migrating birds in Chicago.
The second study, led by Winger and Weeks lab postdoc Marketa Zimova, is in the Journal of Animal Ecology. This paper builds on our previous research on a time series of bird specimens from building collisions in Chicago, which revealed that many species of migratory birds have changed size and shape over the past 40 years. This new paper shows that these birds have also changed their migration phenology, but that the changes in morphology are likely unrelated to the changes in phenology. Read more about the paper here and check out our interview on Michigan Radio's Stateside with April Baer here.
The first, led by Cornell postdoc Benjamin Van Doren, was in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and represents an important step forward in our understanding of how artificial light drives fatal bird building collisions during migration -- and what we can do about it. This paper builds on a previous Winger lab paper on the relationship between artificial light and building collisions in migratory birds. Read more about the new paper here. This research was featured on the front page of the Chicago Tribune and the focus of a Chicago Tribune Editorial Board piece calling to reduce building lighting to save migrating birds in Chicago.
The second study, led by Winger and Weeks lab postdoc Marketa Zimova, is in the Journal of Animal Ecology. This paper builds on our previous research on a time series of bird specimens from building collisions in Chicago, which revealed that many species of migratory birds have changed size and shape over the past 40 years. This new paper shows that these birds have also changed their migration phenology, but that the changes in morphology are likely unrelated to the changes in phenology. Read more about the paper here and check out our interview on Michigan Radio's Stateside with April Baer here.
April 2021: Congrats Kristen!
Congratulations to Winger lab graduate student Kristen Wacker, who passed her qualifying exams to advance to PhD candidacy and received an Honorable Mention for the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
March 2021: Ben on Michigan Radio
In anticipation of spring bird migration, Ben was interviewed on Michigan Radio about bird building collisions.
December 2020: Recent interviews
Ben was interviewed recently for several bird-related articles, including an article in Smithsonian Magazine and two articles in Mlive (here and here).
August 2020: Winger Lab members present at the North American Ornithological Conference
The 2020 North American Ornithological was supposed to be held in Puerto Rico, but was held virtually due to the pandemic. Winger Lab PhD student Eric Gulson-Castillo and undergraduate Vera Ting each presented posters (shown below) while lab affiliates Shane DuBay and Jacob Berv gave presentations.
August 2020: Teresa's new paper in Ecography featured by UM EEB
Teresa Pegan's recent paper on the evolution of geographic range in migratory birds was featured in this nice write-up. The paper can be found here. This paper represents the first of Teresa's dissertation chapters. The rest of her dissertation focuses on evolutionary consequences of migratory movements for population divergence, using genomic tools.
March/April 2020: Winger Lab students win research awards!
Congratulations to Winger Lab students Teresa Pegan and Eric Gulson-Castillo for winning Graduate Student Research Awards from the Society of Systematic Biologists and to Eric and Susanna Campbell for winning awards from the American Ornithological Society (Eric the AOS Joseph Grinnell Award and Susanna the Werner and Hildegard Hesse Award). Congrats also to Melanie Florkowski, a Winger Lab undergrad alum and current PhD student at Texas A&M, for winning the AOS Award. This generous support will go a long way to funding their dissertation research and highlights the value of supporting our academic societies.
Update June 2020: Eric and Susanna were also both award Paul A. Stewart Grants from the Wilson Ornithological Society!
Update June 2020: Eric and Susanna were also both award Paul A. Stewart Grants from the Wilson Ornithological Society!
December 2019: Ben part of Radiolab episode on animal migration
Last March, Ben did a fun interview about the evolution of bird migration for WNYC's Radiolab. The episode aired on December 18th. It's a great exploration of the wonders of animal migration, featuring some giants in the field of bird migration and conservation including Martin Wikelski and David Wilcove.
Episode here: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/there-and-back-again
Episode here: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/there-and-back-again
December 2019: Article on morphological change in migratory birds garners significant media attention
For the past couple years, Ben and other lab group members have been studying an extraordinary specimen time series of morphological measurements of migratory birds from Chicago's Field Museum. The second of our papers using this dataset was published in December in Ecology Letters and attracted significant international media attention, quickly achieving the highest Altmetric score in the journal's history. Check out the Press Release to learn more about the article, as well as some of the media: Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN, BBC, Science Magazine, NBC News, Audubon
This paper is a prime example of the unique and important role that natural history collections play in documenting biodiversity past and present so that we can better predict its future. Without the monumental effort by collections staff at the Field Museum, these data would not exist. The paper is also an important example of Citizen Science: many of the specimens used in the study were salvaged by volunteers for the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors and brought to the Field Museum.
This paper is a prime example of the unique and important role that natural history collections play in documenting biodiversity past and present so that we can better predict its future. Without the monumental effort by collections staff at the Field Museum, these data would not exist. The paper is also an important example of Citizen Science: many of the specimens used in the study were salvaged by volunteers for the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors and brought to the Field Museum.
November 2019: Ben interviewed for National Wildlife
Ben was happy to participate in this feature article in National Wildlife on bird migration, which also features several other colleagues who are leaders in the field on the ecology, evolution and conservation of migratory birds.
September 2019: Hellos and goodbyes
We are thrilled to welcome several new people to the lab! Kristen Wacker joins us as a new PhD student in EEB, Dr. Marketa Zimova joins as a Postdoctoral Fellow in UM's Institute for Global Change Biology (where she will work Ben Winger and Brian Weeks), and Dr. Jake Berv joins as a Postdoctoral Fellow in UM's Life Sciences Institute (where he will work with Matt Friedman, Dan Rabosky, Stephen Smith and Ben Winger). Brian Weeks finished his appointment as a Postdoc in the Winger Lab, but he has not gone far -- he is starting his own lab as an Assistant Professor in UM's School for the Environment and Sustainability and we look forward to continuing our collaborative work.
We also bid a bittersweet farewell to Mary Margaret Ferraro, a longtime staff member (and prior to that, high school volunteer) of the UMMZ. Mary Margaret has been our talented specimen preparator and collections assistant for several years, and she is moving on to an exciting new permanent position as the ornithology Collection Manager of the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates and Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Congratulations Mary Margaret!
We also bid a bittersweet farewell to Mary Margaret Ferraro, a longtime staff member (and prior to that, high school volunteer) of the UMMZ. Mary Margaret has been our talented specimen preparator and collections assistant for several years, and she is moving on to an exciting new permanent position as the ornithology Collection Manager of the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates and Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Congratulations Mary Margaret!
June 2019: Fieldwork in Manitoba
We continued our ongoing fieldwork studying boreal birds across their breeding ranges, this summer visiting Manitoba. The fieldwork resulted in some of the first genetic sampling from this part of the breeding range for many species, and will help further our understanding of both the evolutionary history and conservation needs of boreal birds. We thank the Manitoba Fish & Wildlife department for providing us access to a cabin in a spectacular area of boreal forest (video © Brett Benz):
April 2019: New paper linking nocturnal flight calls and bird-building collisions makes an impact
It's been a privilege for us to be able to study an extraordinary but sobering dataset of bird-building collisions based at the Field Museum. Our first paper about this dataset is now published, and is available Open Access here.
Media coverage included articles in Science Magazine, PBS Nova, Chicago Tribune, Audubon, The Guardian, The Conversation, and NSF News.
This study was made possible in part through the hard work of many citizen scientists in Chicago and Cleveland, documenting bird collisions and submitting eBird observations. At the UM Museum of Zoology, we are engaged with similar collision monitoring efforts throughout Michigan.
Media coverage included articles in Science Magazine, PBS Nova, Chicago Tribune, Audubon, The Guardian, The Conversation, and NSF News.
This study was made possible in part through the hard work of many citizen scientists in Chicago and Cleveland, documenting bird collisions and submitting eBird observations. At the UM Museum of Zoology, we are engaged with similar collision monitoring efforts throughout Michigan.
March 2019: Our Biological Reviews paper wins the AOS Katma Award
We were honored to learn that our recent paper, "A long winter for the Red Queen: rethinking the evolution of seasonal migration", published in Biological Reviews, was selected as the winner of the American Ornithological Society's Katma Award. Read more here: https://lsa.umich.edu/eeb/news-events/all-news/search-news/challenging-bird-biology-dogma--winger-lab-wins-aos-katma-award.html
Thank you to the AOS for this nice honor!
Thank you to the AOS for this nice honor!
December 2018: Brian Weeks accepts faculty position in UM's School for Environment and Sustainability!
A huge congratulations to Winger Lab postdoc Brian Weeks for a major — and richly deserved — career milestone: Brian has accepted an offer for a tenure-track faculty position in UM's School for Environment and Sustainability, starting in September 2019. We're thrilled for Brian's success and that he will be close by to continue as part of the UMMZ Bird Division's growing research community. Read more about Brian's work here: http://bcweeks.weebly.com/
December 2018: seed funding granted for new research on migratory birds and the magnetosphere
A new research direction in our lab is studying the evolution of magnetoreception in birds and the influence of the magnetosphere on bird migration. We are pleased to have received $60K in seed funding from University of Michigan's MCubed program, for a collaboration between our lab and scientists from UM's Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering department.
November 2018: new lab publication on the evolution seasonal migration
A new synthesis paper from our lab group explores the evolution of seasonal migration and its impact on evolutionary processes such as geographic range evolution. We hope it will be useful for researchers working on and thinking about bird migration from a variety of ecological and evolutionary angles (Read the paper here)
November 2018: new publications from Eric and Teresa
Winger Lab graduate students Teresa Pegan and Eric Gulson-Castillo each had first-authored papers published this fall, in PloS One and Wilson Journal of Ornithology, respectively, on research they did as undergraduates prior to coming to UM. It's always great to see undergrad research published -- kudos to Teresa and Eric for seeing these papers through!
September 2018: Ben and Teresa teach Ornithology in UM's new Biological Sciences Building
Ben taught Ornithology (EEB433) this fall, along with Teresa Pegan as the Graduate Student Instructor. This was the inaugural class in the specimen-based teaching classroom in the new Biological Sciences Building on UM's central campus (read more about the building in this newsletter, where Ornithology is featured on page 4). The class makes intensive use of UMMZ specimens to teach global avian diversity (nearly 170 bird families are covered in the class!). We also had great field trips, including a visit to Black Swamp Bird Observatory's banding station, and the Detroit River hawk watch.
June 2018: UMMZ & Winger Lab continue boreal fieldwork
PhD student Susanna Campbell and postdoc Brian Weeks headed north this year to the western Upper Peninsula of Michigan to continue our ongoing field research on the population genetics of boreal birds. They were joined by our collaborators from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum. The collaborative expedition had multiple foci, including specimen and sample collection for research on chickadee genomics, range shifts and morphological adaptation to climate change in migratory birds, and thrush microbiota.
May 2018: Teresa studies nocturnal migration in Borneo
With support from a National Geographic Young Explorer's Grant, PhD student Teresa Pegan traveled to Borneo this spring to study nocturnal bird migration over the Crocker range near Mt. Kinabalu. The extent of nocturnal migration in the tropics is more poorly understudied than in the temperate zone, and Teresa's research promises to shed light on some interesting patterns. Teresa was joined by UMMZ Collections Assistant Mary Margaret Ferraro.
May 2018: Ben teaches Biology of Birds at the University of Michigan Biological Station
One of the longest-running field ornithology classes in the country is the Biology of Birds course (EEB 330) at the University of Michigan Biological Station in the northern Lower Peninsula. This class has been taught consistently since the inception of the station in 1909, and was made famous by the legendary Olin Sewall Petingill, who taught the class for many years while writing the widely used textbook Ornithology in Lab and Field. Ben had a blast teaching two weeks of the month-long course this year, along with Dave Ewert of the Nature Conservancy. The class explored all kinds of habitats near the Biostation and enjoyed a two-night camping trip at Whitefish Point and Tahquamenon Falls. A major highlight was a flock of Whimbrel that motored by Whitefish Point late one evening on their way to Hudson Bay.
April 2018: Teresa awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
Winger Lab PhD student Teresa Pegan was awarded a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. Her proposal focuses on the evolutionary consequences of dispersal differences in migratory birds. Congrats Teresa!
April 2018: Winger Lab goes to AOS Tucson
The Winger lab descended on Tucson, AZ for the annual meeting of the American Ornithological Society. Ben presented work from a project with postdoc Brian Weeks on a large specimen series of migratory birds from Chicago that has revealed nearly universal morphological responses to climatic change across a diverse array of species. Brian presented work from his dissertation looking at the relationship between diversity and vulnerability of birds across the Solomon Islands. And PhD student Susanna Campbell networked with a range of researchers looking at chickadee hybridization to firm up her plans for her dissertation research and to connect with some of the other labs working on chickadees.
February 2018: Ben is quoted in a National Geographic article on bird migration
August 2017: Speciation Symposium
Along with Jay McEntee of the University of Florida, Ben hosted a symposium titled "Trait divergence and speciation: Tempo, mode and mechanism" at the American Ornithological Society meeting in East Lansing, MI. The outstanding speaker lineup included Haley Kenyon, Sara Lipshutz, Nick Mason, Jason Weir, Jay and Ben.
July 2017: Andean bird speciation research published
The culmination of Ben's PhD dissertation was published in the July issue of Evolution. Accompanying the article were this Evolution Digest feature and a UMich EEB research feature.
June 2017: Fieldwork in Minnesota
Ben and collaborators Andy Jones and Courtney Brennan from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and Heather Skeen from the Field Museum in Chicago traveled to northern Minnesota for their research on the population genetics of migratory boreal birds. The fieldwork resulted in some of the first genetic sampling from this part of the breeding range for several species, and will help further our understanding of both the evolutionary history and conservation needs of boreal birds.
April 2017: Migration research featured in Living Bird
Ben's 2014 paper on the evolution of bird migration was featured in the spring issue of Living Bird magazine. The article included these fantastic gifs by Virginia Greene, illustrating the difference between the "northern" and "southern" home theories for the evolution of bird migration, which were central to the research. Ben's paper showed that bird migration evolved out of the northern hemisphere more frequently than had been previously supposed. This research was previously featured in other media including National Geographic.
April 2017: Seminar at Kellogg Biological Station
Ben had a great time visiting Michigan State University's Kellogg Biological Station to give a seminar. He was thrilled to see the seminar advertised with this amazing chalk illustration of the Yellow-scarfed Tanager!
All images, unless otherwise indicated, © Benjamin M. Winger, All Rights Reserved