Malcolm Burgess

University of Exeter | UoE · Faculty of Health and Life Sciences Biosciences

Over the past four decades, rising temperatures have impacted the breeding phenology of many bird species, in some cases with consequences for their reproductive success. Migratory birds face particular challenges in shifting breeding phenology to track warmer springs, and understanding the impacts of rising spring temperatures on migratory birds'...

Identifying population drivers of migratory birds requires knowledge of species' ecology throughout their annual cycle. For most Afro‐Palaearctic migratory species, little is known about non‐breeding habitat use, despite extensive land use change in non‐breeding areas of sub‐Saharan Africa being a key factor implicated in population decline. We rad...

Measures to boost populations can help ensure population persistence in the short‐term while longer‐term conservation interventions take effect. Headstarting, involving the collection of wild early life‐stage individuals, rearing in captivity, and release into a new or existing population once independent, has recently been identified as a potentia...

Spatio-temporal variation in age structure influences social and demographic functioning, yet we have limited understanding of the spatial scale at which its fluctuations are synchronised between wild populations. Using 32 great tit populations, spanning 3200km and >130,000 birds across 67 years, we quantify spatial synchrony in breeding age struct...

Conditions experienced by an individual during migration have the potential to shape migratory tactic and in turn fitness. For large birds, environmental conditions encountered during migration have been linked with survival and subsequent reproductive output, but this is less known for smaller birds, hindering our understanding of mechanisms drivi...

Conservation of protected sites involves stakeholders with a variety of perspectives and values of how land should be managed. Understanding the perceptions of different stakeholders are key to considering changes to conservation practises and to inform conflict strategies. Non-native gamebird release for recreational shooting in the UK includes as...

Insects are key components of food chains, and monitoring data provides new opportunities to identify trophic relationships at broad spatial and temporal scales. Here, combining two monitoring datasets from Great Britain, we reveal how the population dynamics of the blue tit Cyanistes caeruleus are influenced by the abundance of moths – a core comp...

Aims Understanding the suite of environmental changes impacting migration and disentangling these from the dependencies between migratory stages is fundamental to understanding the drivers and mechanisms causing spatial shifts to migratory bird distributions. In this review, our objectives are to: (i) provide evidence of spatial change at all migra...

Life history traits and environmental conditions influence reproductive success in animals, and consequences of these can influence subsequent survival and recruitment into breeding populations. Understanding influences on demographic rates is required to determine the causes of decline. Migratory species experience spatially and temporally variabl...

Insects play important roles in food chains, but quantifying how insect abundance affects population dynamics in natural communities is challenging. National scale monitoring data provides opportunities to identify trophic relationships at broad spatial and temporal scales but requires careful approaches to link data from different schemes. Here, u...

The Black-tailed Godwit is a large, elegant wading bird that once commonly bred in eastern England, but is now largely restricted to the Nene and Ouse Washes. In this article, we discuss the ecology of breeding Black-tailed Godwits in the UK and describe the conservation interventions that have been trialed to reduce predation pressures and boost p...

Identifying the environmental drivers of variation in fitness‐related traits is a central objective in ecology and evolutionary biology. Temporal fluctuations of these environmental drivers are often synchronized at large spatial scales. Yet, whether synchronous environmental conditions can generate spatial synchrony in fitness‐related trait values...

Climate change has been driving long-distance migratory birds to alter their schedules under the threat of being mismatched with their food peak at the breeding grounds. It is important to study the relative contribution of environmental, genetic and ontogenetic components in various spring timing traits in the wild in order to predict the true pot...

Many migratory species are in decline across their geographical ranges. Single‐population studies can provide important insights into drivers at a local scale, but effective conservation requires multi‐population perspectives. This is challenging because relevant data are often hard to consolidate, and state‐of‐the‐art analytical tools are typicall...

Capsule British breeding Wood Warblers Phylloscopus sibilatrix show a clockwise loop migration incorporating stops in southern Europe, the Sahel, and the humid forest zone of West Africa. Aims To determine autumn and spring migration routes, the location and duration of stopover sites on migration, and the location of non-breeding areas of British...

Oscine birds preferentially respond to certain sounds over others from an early age, which focuses subsequent learning onto sexually relevant songs. Songs vary both across species and, due to cultural evolution, among populations of the same species. As a result, early song responses are expected to be shaped by selection both to avoid the fitness...

Nest predation is the primary cause of nest failure in most ground-nesting bird species. Investigations of relationships between nest predation rate and habitat usually pool different predator species. However, such relationships likely depend on the specific predator involved, partly because habitat requirements vary among predator species. Poolin...

Differences in population trends across a species' breeding range are ultimately linked to variation in demographic rates. In small songbirds, demographic rates related to fecundity typically have strong effects on population trends. Populations of a forest songbird, the wood warbler Phylloscopus sibilatrix, have been declining in many but not all...

Temperature plays an important role in determining the breeding phenology of birds in temperate climates, with higher spring temperatures associated with earlier breeding. However, the effect of localised territory‐scale temperature variations is poorly understood, with relationships between temperature and breeding phenology mostly studied using c...

Insufficient reproduction as a consequence of predation on eggs and chicks is a major determinant of population decline in ground‐nesting birds, including waders. For many populations, there is an urgent need to maintain breeding populations at key sites, and conservation practitioners need to find viable management solutions to reduce predation. O...

Many migratory species are in decline across their geographical ranges. Single-population studies can provide important insights into drivers at a local scale, but effective conservation requires multi-population perspectives. This is challenging because relevant data are often hard to consolidate, and state-of-the-art analytical tools are typicall...

The phenology of many species shows strong sensitivity to climate change; however, with few large scale intra-specific studies it is unclear how such sensitivity varies over a species’ range. We document large intra-specific variation in phenological sensitivity to temperature using laying date information from 67 populations of two co-familial Eur...

Telomere length and shortening rate are increasingly used as biomarkers for long-term costs in ecological and evolutionary studies because of their relationships with survival and fitness. Both early-life conditions and growth, and later-life stressors can create variation in telomere shortening rate. Studies on between-population telomere length a...

Climate change influences population demography by altering patterns of gene flow and reproductive isolation. Direct mutation rates offer the possibility for accurate dating on the within-species level but are currently only available for a handful of vertebrate species. Here, we use the first directly estimated mutation rate in birds to study the...

Songbird populations are in decline all over the world, and our understanding of the causal mechanisms remains surprisingly limited. It is important to identify the extent of individual variation in migratory behaviour to better understand species' ability to respond to environmental change. We describe the annual migratory behaviour of British bre...

During the last 50 years, the breeding population of Continental Black-tailed Godwits Limosa limosa limosa in the United Kingdom has been relatively small (below 60 pairs) and largely concentrated in two locations in eastern England. There were severe declines at the Ouse Washes during the 1990s due to increased spring flooding. In the following ye...

Farmland birds have declined throughout Europe over recent decades. Many farmland songbirds are associated with linear woody features on field boundaries, such as hedgerows and tree lines. Previous studies have assessed songbird associations with specific hedgerow and tree characteristics, and their landscape context, but large-scale assessments ha...

Telomere length and shortening rate are increasingly used as biomarkers for long-term costs in ecological and evolutionary studies because of their relationships with survival and fitness. Telomere length can be heritable, but both early-life conditions and later-life stressors can create variation in telomere shortening rate. Studies on between-po...

Many species have advanced the timing of annual reproductive cycles in response to climatic warming, sometimes leading to asynchrony between trophic levels, with negative population consequences. Long‐distance migratory birds, reliant on short seasonal food pulses for breeding, are considered particularly susceptible to such disjunction because lat...

Temperature is a key determinant of breeding phenology in temperate zone birds, with increasing spring temperature across years or large geographic gradients known to advance timing of breeding. It is less well understood how localised, territory-scale temperature variations effect territory occupation, breeding phenology and productivity, primaril...

Climate warming has caused the seasonal timing of many components of ecological food chains to advance. In the context of trophic interactions, the match–mismatch hypothesis postulates that differential shifts can lead to phenological asynchrony with negative impacts for consumers. However, at present there has been no consistent analysis of the li...

The integration and synthesis of the data in different areas of science is drastically slowed and hindered by a lack of standards and networking programmes. Long‐term studies of individually marked animals are not an exception. These studies are especially important as instrumental for understanding evolutionary and ecological processes in the wild...

Conservation resources are limited and need to be used where they can be most effective. Deciding where within a species range to implement conservation interventions requires knowledge of where threats operate and consideration of multiple spatial issues concerning patterns in abundance across species' ranges, and geographical and environmental gr...

The phenology of many species shows strong sensitivity to climate change; however, with few large scale intra-specific studies it is unclear how such sensitivity varies over a species' range. We document large intra-specific variation in phenological sensitivity to temperature using laying date information from 67 populations of two European songbi...

The integration and synthesis of the data in different areas of science is drastically slowed and hindered by a lack of standards and networking programmes. Long-term studies of individually marked animals are not an exception. These studies are especially important as instrumental for understanding evolutionary and ecological processes in the wild...

Climate warming has caused the seasonal timing of many components of ecological food chains to advance (Thackeray et al. 2010, 2016). In the context of trophic interactions the match-mismatch hypothesis (MMH) postulates that differential shifts can lead to phenological asynchrony with negative impacts for consumers (Cushing 1990). However, it is st...

Little is known about the dietary richness and variation of generalist insectivorous species, including birds, due primarily to difficulties in prey identification. Using faecal metabarcoding we provide the most comprehensive analysis of a passerine's diet to date, identifying the relative magnitudes of biogeographic, habitat and temporal trends in...

Determining the links between breeding populations and the pressures, threats and conditions they experience presents a challenge for the conservation of migratory birds which can use multiple sites separated by hundreds to thousands of kilometres. Furthermore, migratory connectivity – the connections made by migrating individuals between networks...

Each year, billions of songbirds cross large ecological barriers during their migration. Understanding how they perform this incredible task is crucial to predict how global change may threaten the safety of such journeys. Earlier studies based on radar suggested that most songbirds cross deserts in intermittent flights at high altitude, stopping i...

Context Organisations acting to conserve and protect species across large spatial scales prioritise to optimise use of resources. Spatial conservation prioritization tools typically focus on identifying areas containing species groups of interest, with few tools used to identify the best areas for single-species conservation, in particular, to cons...

Capsule: There is a substantial gain in precision and accuracy of geolocator locations when using a light stalk. Aims: Light stalks or tubes increase the accuracy of geolocators when tracking migrant birds because they reduce potential shading of the light sensor by feathers but may increase detrimental tag effects. We aimed to determine how adding...

Establishing the cues or constraints that influence avian timing of breeding is the key to accurate prediction of future phenology. This study aims to identify the aspects of the environment that predict the timing of two measures of breeding phenology (nest initiation and egg laying date) in an insectivorous woodland passerine, the blue tit (Cyani...

A classic system for studying trophic mismatch focuses on the timing of the spring caterpillar peak in relation to the breeding time and productivity of woodland passerine birds. Most work has been conducted in single-site oak woodlands, and little is known about how insights generalize to other woodland types or across space. Here we present the r...

Currently, the deployment of tracking devices is one of the most frequently used approaches to study movement ecology of birds. Recent miniaturization of light‐level geolocators enabled studying small bird species whose migratory patterns were widely unknown. However, geolocators may reduce vital rates in tagged birds and may bias obtained movement...

Increasing temperatures associated with climate change may generate phenological mismatches that disrupt previously synchronous trophic interactions. Most work on mismatch has focused on temporal trends, whereas spatial variation in the degree of trophic synchrony has largely been neglected, even though the degree to which mismatch varies in space...

In the original publication of the article, there is a misalignment of the last two columns in table 2. The correct Table 2 is provided below.

The flexibility for migrant land birds to be able to travel long distances rapidly without stop‐overs, and thus to cross wide inhospitable areas such as deserts and oceans, is likely to be a major determinant of their survival during migration. We measured variation in flight distance, speed, and duration of major stop‐overs (more than two days), u...

Many organisms adjust their reproductive phenology in response to climate change, but phenological sensitivity to temperature may vary between species. For example, resident and migratory birds have vastly different annual cycles, which can cause differential temperature sensitivity at the breeding grounds, and may affect competitive dynamics. Curr...

Increasing rates of nest predation is one of several hypotheses proposed to explain observed declines of Wood Warbler Phylloscopus sibilatrix populations in the UK. Nest predation may be influenced by how nest concealment is affected by vegetation structure, which may vary between breeding sites. Detailed nest monitoring within three study areas wi...

The nesting phenology and productivity of hole‐nesting woodland passerines, such as tit species (Paridae), has been the subject of many studies and played a central role in advancing our understanding of the causes and consequences of trophic mismatch. However, as most studies have been conducted in mature, oak‐rich (Quercus sp.) woodlands, it is u...

Although the number of studies discerning the impact of climate change on ecological systems continues to increase, there has been relatively little sharing of the lessons learnt when accumulating this evidence. At a recent workshop entitled ‘Using climate data in ecological research’ held at the UK Met Office, ecologists and climate scientists cam...

Birds often engage in nest defence against predators to improve breeding success, but defence efficiency requires the capability to assess the threat level posed by potential predators. For species with low breeding-site tenacity, which may encounter varying occurrence and density of predators in different areas, threat recognition could be comprom...

The spatial scale of non-breeding areas used by long-distance migrant animals can vary from specific, relatively small non-breeding areas for each independent breeding population (high connectivity) to a distribution over a large non-breeding area with mixing of breeding populations (low connectivity). Measuring variation in the degree of connectiv...

Tracking small passerines using miniaturised location tags is a rapidly expanding field of study. In a one-year study, we tested whether there were any short- or longer-term effects of fitting geolocators weighing 3% of body mass on male Pied Flycatchers Ficedula hypoleuca. In the deployment year, we compared adult provisioning rates to nestlings,...

Protected area designation aims to protect forests from illegal activities such as hunting. However, the effectiveness of protection and how this changes over time in response to protection measures is difficult to assess, including the design of monitoring programmes able to detect changes. We present new data on rule-breaking prevalence in Gola R...

Most attention on tropical biodiversity conservation has focussed on protected areas. Recognising and enhancing the value of biodiversity outside, as well as inside, protected areas is increasingly important given recognition that biodiversity targets will not be met through protected areas alone. We investigated the extent to which protection infl...

The fitting of miniaturised location tags to small passerines is a rapidly expanding field of study. In a 1-year study, we compare provisioning rates, nestling growth, nest success and return rates the following year between nests where the adult male was fitted with a geolocator <3% body weight, against untagged control males with the same capture...

Data from location logging tags have revolutionised our understanding of migration ecology, but methods of tagging that do not compromise survival need to be identified. We compared resighting rates for 156 geolocator-tagged and 316 colour ringed-only Whinchats on their African wintering grounds after migration to and from Eastern Europe in two sep...

Capsule All British Marsh Tits belong to subspecies Poecile palustris dresseri, being smaller than nominate P. p. palustris of central Europe.Aims Determining the subspecies of Marsh Tit in Britain to test whether ssp. P. p. palustris occurs in northern England and Scotland, by assessing regional variation in size compared with central European bir...

The first details of the migration pattern of a male Ring Ouzel Turdus torquatus, fitted with a geolocator on its Scottish breeding grounds, showed that it wintered in the Algerian Atlas Mountains, substantially east of the suspected main wintering area.

Understanding what drives or prevents long-distance migrants to respond to environmental change requires basic knowledge about the wintering and breeding grounds, and the timing of movements between them. Both strong and weak migratory connectivity have been reported for Palearctic passerines wintering in Africa, but this remains unknown for most s...

Capsule Maximum provisioning rates occurred during the seasonal peak in caterpillar availability, controlling for brood age and time of day. Aims To determine if the seasonal availability of caterpillars influenced Wood Warbler Phylloscopus sibilatrix nest provisioning rates. Methods Remote cameras were used to monitor nest visits at 14 nests in 8...

Capsule Trends in young woodland availability influenced population trends and abundance of Tree Pipit and Lesser Redpoll, but not 10-km square occupancy. Aims To investigate whether changes in availability of young woodland could have driven population change, and trends in abundance and occupancy, of declining Tree Pipit and Lesser Redpoll popula...

Geographic variation in phenotypes plays a key role in fundamental evolutionary processes such as local adaptation, population differentiation and speciation, but the selective forces behind it are rarely known. We found support for the hypothesis that geographic variation in plumage traits of the pied flycatcher Ficedula hypoleuca is explained by...

Local environmental and ecological conditions are commonly expected to result in local adaptation, although there are few examples of variation in phenotypic selection across continent-wide spatial scales. We collected standardized data on selection with respect to the highly variable plumage coloration of pied flycatcher (Ficedula hypoleuca Pall.)...

Our understanding of the reasons for the serious decline of the Willow Tit Poecile Montana in Britain is constrained by an incomplete knowledge of the species' ecology and demography, which is partly due to the difficulty of persuading Willow Tits to use nestboxes.This paper documents a study in Wiltshire in which Willow Tits have bred in nestboxes...