That’s a good question! Let me look into my publishing agreement and see if there’s something I can do! But in the meantime, send me an email!

Send me an email nmalexan@ucsc.edu

Big fan by the way!❤️

TL;DR:
Feeders are associated with population growth, and morphological change in hummingbird beaks
Read it here 👉 dx.doi.org/10.1111/gcb....
#ornithology #evolution #climatechange

Finally I wanted to thank the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (Shoutout to curator Carla Cicero), the U.S. Census, Christmas Bird Count, PRISM Climate Group, and Newspapers.com for the resources that have been made available.

I also want to thank our fearless mentor, Prof. Alejo Rico-Guevara who has kept the passion alive throughout. And thank you to the best co-leads authors ever, PhD students Simon English and Faye Romero who made this process fun!

We are so grateful to Prof. Laura Stein for her advice on modeling, and to CJ Battey @cjbattey.bsky.social for his help with data acquisition and analysis. We are indebted to Grieg et al. & Battey et al. for their foundational work that inspired this project.

Huge thanks to undergrads who made this work possible: Timothy Barnes, Audrey E. Smith, Saron Akalu, Haarini Sridhar, Gillian Montross & Ezra Collins.👏👏

To test this, Prof. Don Powers @lampornis.bsky.social showed hummingbirds actively heat their beaks after flight. Turns out, the bill helps dissipate heat during perching! 🔥➡️💨

But climate matters too. Using PRISM data, we found that in cooler areas in the north, beaks are shorter, smaller, and deeper, consistent with thermoregulation theory. ❄️☀️

Collaborating with Prof. Zoe Migicovsky @zoemig.bsky.social , Alejandro Rico-Guevara, Felipe Garzón-Agudelo & Kevin Epperly, we used 2D & 3D shape data to show:
Beaks are getting more slender, tapered, and in males, pointier! 🐦

Co-first author Faye Romero and I modelled bill changes of Anna’s hummingbirds in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology’s collection (dating to 1860). 📏
We found bill length and maxillary surface area increased with feeder density.

Building on that, co-first author Simon English showed that feeder abundance was the best predictor of Anna’s hummingbird population growth, especially in the north, where Grieg et al. showed that birds rely more on feeders.

It started with newspaper archives 📜:
Prof. Eliza Grames tracked hummingbird feeder mentions by county in California from 1860 on. She found feeder use rose rapidly, especially from southern to northern CA.