Moore Laboratory of Zoology

🚨 This find was absolutely cuckoo 🚨 As a biodiversity collection with a focus on research
and conservation, we have permits to take in birds found dead in our area, which we then prepare as study specimens that contribute to research and teaching. We were absolutely floored yesterday when a student brought in a Yellow-billed Cuckoo that sadly died from a window strike on campus!
Currently listed a “threatened” in the west by U.S. Fish & Wildlife, there are no records for this bird, usually found adjacent to rivers and streams, from the Los Angeles area this year! The last nearby record was from the San Gabriel River in 2018
While it is sad that this threatened bird did not make it, we are grateful that the record and specimen will be available for science and outreach, hopefully contributing knowledge that will help the species as a whole down the line.

Occidental College undergrad captured this incredible image by the Los Ángeles River of a Red-tailed Hawk stealing a catfish from a forlorn Great Blue Heron. The scientific term for food theft is kleptoparasitism, but according to the you might say this heron got catfished!
For undergrads interested in urban biodiversity, is the place to be!

We spotted these gorgeous Red-lored Parrots at the Temple City Parrot roost last night & snapped a photo in the fading sunlight
Fascinating that despite being outnumbered by Red-crowned Parrots by a factor of 500 to 1, these birds of a feather still flock together!
The native range of Red-lored Parrots stretches from Mexico to Ecuador. Here in Los Angeles, they are a distant fourth most common parrot in the genus Amazona. A rare treat!

Nothing caps off the weekend like observing parrots at their roosting site. Join us on Sunday Nov 12 for our annual Follow the Flock event where we’ll observe the famed Temple City parrot as that arrive in droves to settle down for the evening. Fun for the whole flapping family! RSVP at our Eventbrite linked in profile or search Follow the Flock parrots to find the page

It’s been a while in the making but we are stoked to kick off our outdoor bird specimen prep lab on a beautiful day in Los Angeles!
Turning found-dead birds into research specimens is one of the ways we grow our collection, and the insights can reveal fascinating insights into urban evolution, as we are finding with the naturalized parrots
If you find a dead bird in good condition, give us a holler. Be warned: we might ask you to store it in your freezer for a bit. (Well, maybe after this wave of avian flu has receded.)

Data are beautiful. Especially when they’re scrub-jay data! Moore Lab alum ‘17 led a new research paper looking at how scrub-jays in the genus Aphelocoma have diversified on the North American landscape over the last several million years—and how many species exist today

https://academic.oup.com/sysbio/advance-article/doi/10.1093/sysbio/syac034/6585345?guestAccessKey=c2d051c4-6802-4fe4-9b2a-851b0ff1be3b

The colors and lines in the graphs represent how a battery of analytical methods break up genetic diversity into species
The upshot: results suggest a new species should be recognized in the Texas hill country (purple group in the graphs). This area is currently under grave conservation threat from urbanization and climate change. The Texas Scrub-Jay (A. texana), if recognized, would be the only bird endemic to the state!
Photo: Texas Scrub-Jay by Niall Pirrens (ML 459616441)

The profiled our migration project at Bear Divide (link below) and the tireless work of its leader . Big shout out to our bird counters &
https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/newsletter/2022-05-12/la-tr-best-secret-birding-spot-southern-california-the-wild

📸 Western Tanager by

(n) one who studies nests
Somewhere along the way we forgot what a cool journal cover looks like
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Happy Easter! Eggs are one of Nature’s most ingenious creations. The ovoid shape provides structural strength, while the variations in length and pointiness are the result of species-specific adaptive pressures and constraints
Bird eggs get most of their color in the last hour before laying, when the internal shell gland deposits pigments on a descending egg like a car being painted on an assembly line. Squiggly lines can form if the egg twists while pigment is deposited from a fixed position. The egg pigments—biliverdin (blue & green) and protoporphyrin (brown & beige)—are largely different from the pigments that color birds’ feathers (although feathers of some species contain porphyrins). There are many theories for why some birds have blue eggs: ranging from UV protection, to intraspecies signaling, to excretion of waste products!
Back row (left to right):
Elegant Tern (white w/ brown squiggles)
Glaucous-winged Gull (tan with dark brown flecks)
Front row (left to right):
Gray Catbird (small blue)
Mountain Quail (tan)
Black-crowned Night-Heron (chalky light blue)
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Two dates in April are your last chance for a guided bird migration experience at Bear Divide! Sign up at the Eventbrite link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/305104294157
Check out the spectacle where thousands of birds can be seen streaking by at eye level

Polyamory is trending, and even the famously monogamous cranes are taking part. Recent field studies show that Sarus Cranes form thruples (lower panels in photo), which have their own unison vocalizations called triets (a duet a trois). Trios had higher mating success than pairs, but were found more often in marginal habitats. The research by Suhridam Roy, Swati Kittur & Gopi Sundar changes our understanding of crane biology. The work can be found in Early Online papers in the journal Ecology

Ridgway’s (1886) Nomenclature of Colors for Naturalists wasn’t the first attempt to standardize color for describing nature (there was Werner’s Nomenclature of Colors in 1821) but it was the most successful, adopted by most ornithologists of its time. Its influence can be traced all the way to the Pantone color system of today
While scientists today largely eschew descriptive colors in favor of quantitative measures of light reflectance using a spectrophotometer, there is something evocative about Ridgway’s hand-painted swatches and their esoteric names
Purple-throated Cotinga (Porphyrolaema porphyrolaema)

The Orange-Eared Tanager (Chlorochrysa calliparaea) is another one of those birds that, well … let’s just say it has a name that does not really seem to capture the main things that make it striking. Anyone out there have a better idea?

Visiting researchers are the best, and something we’ve really missed about the last 2 years. You get to meet new people and learn about cool new research. This week we are hosting who is measuring and photographing Song Sparrows as part of her PhD at Cornell & of the project at Colorado State who is sampling tissues from our historic Wilson’s Warblers (a collab with Moore Lab)
Collections space is always better when it’s full of vibrant research activity!

Specimens for two student research projects on loan from were unpacked by today after a respite in the freezer (for the birds, not Jodhan)
10 points if you can name both species

Sometimes our specimens go on sabbatical to do research. Curatorial Associate Sean Lyon ( ) recently rehoused some thrasher specimens that we had loaned to for a study. One paper from those results, with first author Charlotte Probst, was just published in Journal of Avian Biology, showing that, across species, thrasher bills do not seem to vary according to average temperature of their species’ ranges. While foraging utility is usually the go-to hypothesis for bill size & shape, recent research has cautioned that bills can be adaptive for thermoregulation as well. This paper throws a bucket of cold water on that idea, at least for thrashers, pointing back to foraging as the adaptive explanation for species level variation. Good job, thrasher specimens! Your work is done—for now

We had the honor of seeing one of the few intact Elephant Bird subfossil eggs at the . These enormous, extinct birds from Madagascar stood nearly 10 feet tall and might have been nocturnal. This egg could be thousands of years old. Although early historical accounts suggest Elephant Birds might have persisted against human contact until the 1600s, the youngest egg to have been radiocarbon sampled dates to 1000 AD
Insane as it sounds, ancient DNA tells us the Elephant Bird’s closest living relative is the diminutive, nocturnal kiwi from New Zealand!!

Ultraviolet light. Birds see it. We can’t. More than not seeing it; we don’t even have the vocabulary for it. To demonstrate: We created these 3D models of the same Rainbow Lorikeet specimen. Above, we used a normal camera that captures human-visible light. Here, the Rainbow Lorikeet lives up to its name. But there’s a color of the rainbow missing, one humans can’t see. Below, we used a camera that only captures UV light. Suddenly those streaks on the head pop out. And notice how the head & belly, both blue to humans, look radically different in UV. We’ve chosen to show this UV color on a reddish-brown scale, and sometimes you see UV depicted as magenta, but that’s not what the bird sees
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So what *does* the bird see? We don’t know! Color is a complex interplay between light, its capture by the eye & its interpretation by the brain. To truly know how the parrot perceives the streaks on its head, it would have to tell us. Fortunately, parrots are pretty smart, so maybe one day we’ll understand what they have to tell us about color
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Having a lazy Saturday? Join Moore Lab Director John McCormack today at 10am Pacific for a public talk on Clever Corvids (https://chirpforbirds.com/events-in-big-bear-lake/sept-bird-talk/) hosted by
From problem-solving to complex social behavior, Corvids (crows, jays & allies) are some of the most intelligent birds in the world. Dr. McCormack has studied their behavior and evolutionary history for over 20 years
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Tours are the best part of the job, and this one was particularly fun. See us today in the L.A. Times https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/newsletter/2021-09-16/la-the-wild-9-16-21-the-wild

Where to find L.A.'s little-known stash of vintage birds Anyone can discover the hidden gems at Occidental College’s ornithological museum.

Long-tailed Wood-Partridges (Dendrortyx macroura) are rarely seen, to the extent that it is not clear if they are badly declining or just super elusive. Work in the Moore Lab shows that populations in the Mexican highlands represent distinct evolutionary lineages that diverged between 1 million & 0.5 million years ago. These lineages are associated with subtle but measurable differences in their appearance. How would you divide up these specimens into groups?
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Hummingbirds, folks. We’ve got them. This particular tray demonstrates the incredible array of hummingbird diversity in size, shape, and of course color. Data from our hummingbird collection were used in a study in the journal Evolution by Diego Beltrán, & Juan Parra, which showed that male throat color change was associated with the appearance of new species!
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This young Laysan Albatross lost its way and was returned to its colony by Fish & Wildlife. The Kenny Powers-esque mullet is the remnant of its juvenile down feathers. Laysan Albatrosses take around 5 months to fledge and require enormous investment from the parents before and after fledging
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Two fun facts about Laysan Albatrosses: on Oahu, where females outnumber males 2-to-1, female-female pairs raise chicks together. Also, the oldest known breeding bird is a Laysan Albatross named Wisdom who just hatched another chick at the ripe old age of 70 (at least) on Midway Atoll!
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In 1955, Sports Illustrated spotlighted the high-contact sport of birdwatching on their cover. What species do you see? And don’t you think it’s about time they do it again?
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The Hawaiian Duck (Anas wyvilliana) or Koloa presents a fascinating evolutionary story that makes us question the nature of species and what we consider natural. This endangered bird differs from the Mallard because the male (shown here) is unmarked with an olive bill, and is not migratory. Recent genetic work reveals the Hawaiian Duck formed through ancient hybridization between mallards and the Laysan Duck, an even rarer species that disappeared from Hawaii before 1860 and now exists only on Laysan Island and a few atolls. Introduced mallards might be hybridizing with the Hawaiian Duck currently, impacting its distinctive gene pool, but populations on Kaua’i, at least, seem untouched for now. But after all, what is natural for a species that itself was formed through natural hybridization??
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Mutations form the building blocks of evolution. Volunteers Molly Hill and JiaLian Mackey brought this strange Brewer’s Blackbird with a white throat to our attention. The aberration likely results from a mutation in the place or amount of melanin deposited in feathers
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Mutations like this have probably been responsible for the patchy variation in plumage coloration seen across bird species (think of closely related species with different throat colors). In this case, the mutant & its descendants died out without making a perceptible impact on the species as a whole. However, under different conditions, perhaps the mutation would have been favored & even fixed as the dominant type
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What this specimen shows is that mutations are always arising in populations without regard to what might be favored. Most are bad for the individual, just a few are good, and many like this one are probably neutral, randomly blipping in and out for a short time. Mutations can’t see the future, but they are the needed first step toward evolutionary change
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Our 3D birds project was featured in Scientific American today! They did a wonderful job capturing the project and Moore Lab. We wish they had had more room to push the student developers Josh and Noah Medina to the foreground of the story because they have made the project go boom. Enjoy!

See the Beautiful Color of Rare Birds from Every Angle and in Three Dimensions A new project will create high-definition interactive models of 2,000 feathered flyers.

Sometimes you have to put the specimens on a hand-drawn map of Mexico to figure out what’s really going on
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