Cody M. Kent 🐦🐜

I'm going to be teaching general #ecology next fall with at least some #OneHealth perspective added in. Does anyone have recommendations on open access/open source/otherwise free general ecology textbook options?

@skwinnicki I can't find it now, but vox ran an article about how "Porg" should be lower case and I very much disagree lol

Luckily I’m not alone, many professional ornithological societies capitalize unique common names So I’m going to follow an accepted preference in my field over what general copy editors argue worldbirdnames.org/new/english-na…

Getting roasted by a copy editor on this take on the other site “But that doesn’t conform to these style guides” If a communication strategy is more effective than the one the style guide recommends I’m going to use the more effective style, sorry 🤷🏼

@skwinnicki Is-ought arguments are really annoying...

Updated version here! biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Please RT! 🐇🌳📈 Fully funded PhD position helping gather our *FIRST* rangewide abundance estimate for imperiled New England cottontails! Great project with a great team (and one of my favorite collaborators) behind it! Start date: Summer/Fall 2025 Review begins NOW!!

New paper at #JFWM! @cm_kent, @DiannProsser, Jeff Sullivan and I constructed an avian dietary composition database quantifying the diets of 58 Chesapeake Bay waterbirds, which can be used to characterize important forage taxa in this ecosystem. doi.org/10.3996/JFWM-2…

@evornithology I mean, it's good.... But best parulid?

Parulidae: Black-and-white Warbler 📷 Ryan Schain

Regulidae: Flamecrest 📷 Lars Petersson

DeSimone et al. (2024) Persistent species relationships characterize migrating bird communities across stopover sites and seasons @PNASNews doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2… | @AnousBirding @UMCES_AL @LongPointBirdOb @TheMarshWren @BULAbirds | #ornithology #birdmigration

@BenGFreeman1 @cenemes @jamesTstroud @BirdsCaribbean Yeah, those lizards seem to have been a bit bigger. Of the ~70 stomach samples I had from Jamaica across 5 parulid species, this was the only one with vertebrate remains. We only had 5 samples from black-and-white warblers though.

@cm_kent @cenemes @jamesTstroud @BirdsCaribbean amazing photo of the yellow-throated chomping away

talking w/ @jamesTstroud about how great birds & lizards are, and was curious: do we know which birds eat lizards? have you seen birds catch and eat lizards? HBW has diet info for birds, but often general. a couple papers pop up. is this info available from stomach contents?

@BenGFreeman1 @cenemes @jamesTstroud @BirdsCaribbean This was the black-and-white warbler from Jamaica in that paper. The anole was super tiny - probably just hatched. There are a good number of reports among the larger warblers. I suspect chance encounters while foraging for insects, and if it fits down their throat they'll eat it

@cm_kent @cenemes @jamesTstroud @BirdsCaribbean !!! what bird species was this?

@BenGFreeman1 @cenemes @jamesTstroud @BirdsCaribbean The lizard bones were funny to come across. An undergrad found a claw while sorting stomach contents and called me over. She then didn't say anything more about it. Later when I went to ID the insect pieces I found out there ended up being more than half of a skeleton!

@cenemes @jamesTstroud @BirdsCaribbean @cm_kent sweet!

Probably should have waited to do this when I got the flyer! But I’m defending next Tuesday (: please DM me your email so I can send you the link.

@skwinnicki Yeah, every fall someone would come up to me at Tulane and ask if I knew where building X was, and it was almost always "no" 😂

Graduate school is so weird, spent 5 years at this giant university and I’m pretty sure I’ve only been in 8 buildings total I knew every building at my tiny undergrad college so well (although I did work in Archives, spent years with the history of the college at my fingertips)

@cenewman0 Thanks! It was an interesting bit of work... When I started this at the beginning of my post doc in 2020 we were not expecting to end up having a validation data set by the time I ended two years later........ lol

@cm_kent This looks super interesting. Congrats!

Our new paper is out providing risk maps of avian influenza spillover into domestic poultry populations! 🦆🦠🐔 nature.com/articles/s4159…

@NicoSGonzalez Then while reading some old lit on birds in Jamaica, I ran into some writings by Philip Gosse saying that Cuvier must be wrong because he had shot one's leg clean off and it didn't even seem to notice..?!

@NicoSGonzalez Georges Cuvier wrote that these birds must be in constant pain from putting all their weight on these long thin legs 😂

Just preposterous

Other faculty who don't penalize for attendance: Do you frequently get negative student comments blaming you for their poor attendance? Or is that just a me thing...?

@analog_ashley I had to complete "time sheets" but I don't think it was actual hours? I think it was checking that "duties for the day had been performed" which I still need to complete now as faculty?

UCSD now requires postdocs to complete timesheets. This is insane, right? Do other universities have postdocs log their time?