I am excited to spend the next year studying microhabitat selection as a form of behavioural plasticity in great and blue tits, researching whether, and how, the thermal characteristics of nest-site choice may buffer the impacts of climate change. This project will combine long-term nestbox occupancy and visitation records with short-term temperature logger data to examine the potential for behavioural responses to fine-scale thermal variation in Wytham Woods.
In particular, I aim to investigate whether great and blue tits select nest-sites non-randomly with respect to thermal microclimate, whether these choices are behaviourally plastic across years, and whether the thermal characteristics of nest-site microclimate are linked to reproductive success. By doing so, I hope to better understand how fine-scale behavioural responses interact with the population-wide shift towards earlier reproductive timing observed over recent decades, and to explore a potential mechanism through which birds may respond to rising temperatures.
behaviour, ecology, ornithology
