The take-home is pretty clear: If you're just starting out bird feeding and want to bring in the widest variety of birds, skip the commercial mix for a big bag of black oil sunflower seed (or, if you really want to go wild, a bag of shelled sunflower).
Done in India ink and watercolor, her work depicts creatures in fanciful scenarios: a goat rides his bicycle by lunar light; a tutu-wearing bird skips rope on the back of a ballet-slippered goat.
"The little brown bird hopped, skipped and jumped across the small silvery garden that cold frost must have breathed on the night before.
The road back to Kinsale winds its way through rolling hills and along marshy inlets where wading birds skip and skewer.
Exploring how these reproductive tactics might have evolutionary stability, MECMR modelling shows that birds that skipped breeding were less likely to fail or skip in the following year (electronic supplementary material, tables S3 and S4).
Birds that skipped breeding in any given season (a minority) spent a previous winter marked by more flying (figure 2 a), less resting (figure 2 b) and much more foraging (figure 2 c) than birds that attempted breeding.
Second, despite generally high breeding success, and hence unbalanced data with few individuals failing, birds that skip breeding show predictably higher activity (most probably higher foraging effort) in the previous winter (see also [ 11]).
Altogether, skipping birds had in the long run the highest chance of being successful breeders (0.79, 95% confidence interval [95 CI]: [0.36,0.96]) followed by failed birds (0.61, 95 CI: [0.33,0.83]), while successful birds had the lowest chance (0.57, 95 CI: [0.45,0.69]: electronic supplementary material, tables S8 and S9).
Mercifully, the band skipped "Free Bird". Rossington will also play the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano tonight and Fender's in Long Beach on Thursday.
