#ficedula

Yellow-rumped Flycatcher (Ficedula zanthopygia), family Muscicapidae, order Passeriformes, Malaysia

Ultramarine Flycatcher (Ficedula superciliaris), male, family Muscicapidae, order Passeriformes, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, India

Narcissus flycatcher, Ficedula narcissina, in secluded inner room. The brilliant appearance and clear chirping colors the forests of Karuizawa in May.

深窓のキビタキ 5月の軽井沢の森を、その華やかな姿と澄んださえずりで彩る。

Bird is evolving to be less flashy in response to global warming | New Scientist

Sex may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of climate change. But for the collared flycatcher, the two seem to be linked in some mysterious way. As temperatures have risen, male flycatchers’ brilliant white forehead patches have changed from a valuable sexual signal into a liability.

Since 1980, ecologist Lars Gustafsson at Uppsala University in Sweden has been monitoring a population of collared flycatchers on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. Every year, he and his colleagues have marked every bird in the population with numbered leg-bands, allowing the parentage, reproductive success and survival of many generations of birds to be tracked.

In recent years, Gustafsson’s team has noticed that the males’ forehead patches have been shrinking. Team member Simon Evans wondered whether this change was just a response by individual birds to changing conditions, or whether the population as a whole was evolving.

So Evans combed through 34 years of records. He found that early on, birds with larger forehead patches were more likely to contribute genes to future generations than their small-patched neighbours, but this edge reversed in the second half of the study period. Further analysis showed that this change was associated with higher springtime temperatures, a result of changing climate.

Oddly, birds with large forehead patches did worse in warm years, not because they had fewer offspring but because they were less likely to survive the following winter.

Black-and-orange Flycatcher (Ficedula nigrorufa), family Muscicapidae, order Passeriformes, Bharat, India