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Highlights from the latest issue

January 2025 | Vol. 167, issue 1
We’re pleased to deliver the first issue of 2025 containing within it our Citizen Science Special Issue. In total, we have 1 Review, 15 Original Articles, 4 Short Communications, 1 Forum, our regular Book Reviews, the 2024 Early Professional Award and the BOURC’s 57th Report.

Here, Editor in Chief, Jenny Gill, has selected four of her highlights.

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• REVIEW ARTICLE
  Migration mortality in birds
  Ian Newton
  The migratory journeys undertaken by birds can fill us with a sense of wonder, and we imagine that these remarkable feats must involve risks and costs. Higher chances of dying during migration than at other times of the year could greatly influence the evolution of migration, and the situations in which it is likely to occur. In this paper, Ian Newton reviews studies in which rates of mortality during and outwith migration periods have been measured, by mark-resighting or tracking individuals across seasons. This review reveals that mortality rates are often higher during migration than stationary periods, particularly when migratory journeys involve crossing major ecological barriers or encountering harsh weather conditions. Continued tracking of migratory birds will help to reveal more about the costs and benefits of migration, and how these vary across species and ecosystems.
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• ORIGINAL ARTICLE | CITIZEN SCIENCE
  Using citizen science image analysis to measure seabird phenology
  Alice J. Edney, Jóhannis Danielsen, Sébastien Descamps, Jón Einar Jónsson, Ellie Owen, Flemming Merkel, Róbert A. Stefánsson, Matt J. Wood, Mark J. Jessopp, Tom Hart
  This issue contains many of the Special Issue papers emerging from the recent BOU conference on Citizen science and birds, in which a wide range of exciting applications and developments of citizen science approaches in ornithology were explored. One very exciting development in this area has been the use of online platforms in which citizen scientists can analyse images of birds from remote locations, where field surveys can be logistically challenging. In this paper, Alice Edney and colleagues describe such an approach through the Seabird Watch project, in which volunteers classified >200,000 images from time-lapse cameras to reveal the breeding phenology of Black-legged Kittiwakes across colonies. The authors explore the accuracy and cost-effectiveness of these approaches, and their power to reveal important new insights and understanding.
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• SHORT COMMUNICATION
  Shading by vegetation facilitates cryptic reproductive behaviour in a tropical songbird
  Carlos Biagolini-Jr, Pedro Diniz, Regina H. Macedo, Michael S. Webster
  Among the concerns facing breeding birds can be the risk of falling foul to egg-dumping by brood parasites, and having to bear the costs of raising unrelated offspring. Avoiding these risks might be harder when nests are concealed in vegetation, and intruders might be more likely to go undetected. In this Short Communication, Carlos Biagolini and colleagues explore this issue in socially monogamous Blue-black Grassquits in Brasilia. By measuring the relatedness of chicks within nests that varied in the extent of vegetation shading, the authors showed that egg-dumping by brood parasites was more common in nests that were more shaded by vegetation. The authors describe how shading could both provide cover for brood parasites and make it more difficult for parents to detect eggs that do not belong to them, and explore the intriguing potential for greater display activity by males in shaded conditions to inadvertently attract brood parasites.
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• FORUM
  Use and definitions of the terms arena, lek and court in describing avian courtship sites
  Clifford B. Frith
  Lekking species, in which polygynous males aggregate and display in attempts to attract females with whom they can mate, are among the most remarkable of bird breeding systems. These species and their often-extraordinary display behaviours have fascinated ornithologists for centuries, and a complicated array of terminology has been used to describe their courtship sites over this period. In this Forum article, Clifford Frith sets out to clarify this terminology, and in particular to argue that the term ‘arena’ has created confusion and ambiguity in lekking studies and should in future be avoided.
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Other items

Book reviews
BOU Early Professional Award 2024
BOURC 57th Report
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Image credits
From top:
European honey buzzard | Pierre-Marie Epiney CC BY-SA 2.0 Wikimedia Commons
Black-legged Kittiwake | Gregory “Slobirdr” Smith CC BY-SA 2.0 Wikimedia Commons
Blue-Black Grassquit | Félix Uribe CC BY-SA 2.0 Wikimedia Commons
Ruff | Johann Friedrich Naumann (1780–1857) Public domain Wikimedia Commons