Morphological changes concurrent with climate change are increasingly identified in birds, often through decreasing body size and increasing appendage size. Such changes could have thermoregulatory implications, through the improved surface area to body ratio they provide. Due to the role of bird wings in thermoregulation, wing length relative to body mass may be changing as another form of shape‐shifting, where increased relative wing length may facilitate increased heat loss as climates warm. We investigated cha…

Letter to the journal editor.

Animals are predicted to shrink and shape-shift as the climate warms; declining in size, while their appendages lengthen. Determining which types of species are undergoing these morphological changes, and why, is critical to understanding species responses to global change, including potential adaptation to climate warming. We examine body size and bill length changes in 25 shorebird species using extensive field data (>200,000 observations) collected over 46 years (1975-2021) by community scientists. We sh…

Per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) may threaten wildlife due to their high environmental persistence, toxicity potential and potential to bioaccumulate. Bioaccumulation may be particularly profound in long-lived animals inhabiting higher trophic niches. To date, there is a paucity of data on PFAS bioaccumulation potential in individual wild birds over their lifetime. In this study, we analysed within-individual PFAS contamination in a declining long-distance migratory shorebird, the ruddy turnstone (Arena…

Abstract There is an ongoing and profound burden of lineage 2.3.4.4b high pathogenicity avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 on wildlife and poultry, globally. Herein we report the continued absence of HPAI and antibodies against lineage 2.3.4.4b HPAI from October – December 2023, in migratory birds shortly after their arrival in Australia. Given the ever-changing phenotype of this virus, worldwide studies on the occurrence, or here absence of the virus, are of critical importance to understand the virus’ dispersal and inc…