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Highlights from the latest issue

April 2026 | Vol. 168, issue 2
We’re pleased to deliver the second issue of 2026, full of reviews, original articles, short communications and forum articles. Here, Editor in Chief, Jenny Gill, has selected four of her highlights.

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• REVIEW ARTICLE
  A systematic review of interspecific breeding in woodpeckers
  Antonii Bakai, Jérôme Fuchs, Gerard Gorman, Dominika Sajdak, Łukasz Kajtoch
  Woodpeckers across the world are often sedentary species that are highly territorial. These conditions might be expected to reduce opportunities for interspecific breeding to occur, but rates of hybridisation among woodpecker species are not well described. In this review paper, Antonii Bakai and colleagues collate the available information on hybridisation among woodpeckers, and which species are involved. They reveal that records of hybrid woodpeckers are surprisingly common and even occur among distantly related species. The authors highlight the potential for modern molecular techniques to reveal much more about the role that hybridisation may have played in woodpecker evolutionary history.
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• ORIGINAL ARTICLE
  A new species of jewel-babbler (Cinclosomatidae: Ptilorrhoa) from the Southern Fold Mountains of Papua New Guinea
  Iain A. Woxvold, Banak G. Gamui, Leo Legra, Samson Yama, Bonny Koane, Salape Tulai
  The New Guinea region is famous for its exceptional biodiversity and new species are still being described, particularly from environments with complex terrains that are difficult to survey. In this exciting paper, Iain Woxvold and colleagues describe a new species, the Hooded Jewel-babbler, from the forested karst environments of the Southern Fold Mountains. This new Ptilorrhoa species revealed itself by being captured on film during a camera-trap monitoring study of ground-dwelling birds and mammals. The authors identify a suite of other locations that might be suitable for this species, and at which surveys would help to identify the range and conservation status of this new species.
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• SHORT COMMUNICATION
  Stable isotope data indicate origins of mislabelled historical bird specimens
  Rafael Dantas Lima, Ana Beatriz Navarro, Jason Newton, Alexander Charles Lees, Luís Fábio Silveira
  Museum specimens hold huge scientific value and can be extremely helpful in understanding historical distributions of species and how these may have changed over time. What happens if the information on where specimens were collected is inaccurate and can such errors be identified and corrected? In this Short Communication, Rafael Dantas Lima and colleagues tackle the long-standing mystery of Amazonian bird specimens from the late 19th Century that were attributed to the Atlantic forests of Brazil. Using stable isotope ratios to uncover the origins of these specimens, the authors reveal that they were indeed from Amazonia, and not from the Atlantic Forests. The study highlights the power of stable isotope analyses in resolving cases of uncertain origins of museum specimens.
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• FORUM
  Challenges in population monitoring: Bar-tailed Godwits (Limosa lapponica) on the East Atlantic Flyway defy assumed population structure
  Jesse R. Conklin, Roeland A. Bom, Åke Lindström, Pierrick Bocher, Theunis Piersma
  Many populations of waders and wildfowl are monitored in the non-breeding season, often through co-ordinated counts of wetlands on which such species congregate. When breeding populations co-occur in winter, interpreting these counts can be challenging. In this important Forum article, Jesse Conklin and colleagues consider the assumption that the Bar-tailed Godwits wintering in Europe are all of the lapponica population, while those wintering in Africa are of the declining taymyrensis population. Recent genetic analyses and tracking data have revealed that many taymyrensis godwits do in fact winter in Europe, and that the population of lapponica is likely to be much smaller than current estimates suggest. The authors also consider the intriguing possibility of breeding range shifts creating an emergent contact zone between the subspecies, leading to hybridisation and potentially influencing patterns of juvenile settlement in winter.
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Image credits
From top:
Examples of hybridizing pairs of woodpeckers | © G. Gorman
Ptilorrhoa urrissia habitat on Iagifu Ridge | © Iain Woxvold
Crescent-chested Puffbird | rodrigo_lazaro CC BY 4.0 Wikimedia Commons
Bar-tailed Godwit | Onioram CC BY-SA 4.0 Wikimedia Commons