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Climate change poses a growing threat to biodiversity, but disentangling its overall impact from other anthropogenic stressors is challenging. Here the authors use a data-driven climate attribution framework to identify a key role of heat extremes in causing changes in bird populations globally.

Highly pathogenic avian influenza is an increasing global concern but its distribution in remote regions is not known. Here, the authors conduct an environmental influenza surveillance study in remote, uninhabited regions of the Global South by sampling fresh bird guano.

Bird wings resemble the digits on the hands of dinosaurs, but which digit positions gave rise to those seen in modern birds is still unclear. In this work, long-term fate maps of the chick wing polarizing region are presented, supporting fossil data that birds descended from theropods that had digits 1, 2 and 3.

The true number of human-driven bird extinctions is likely larger than we think. Here, the authors combine recorded extinctions with estimates from the fossil record to suggest that ~1400 bird species have gone extinct since the Late Pleistocene.

Animals moving in groups are expected to differ from their many-body counterparts in equilibrium. A method based on maximum entropy shows that the interactions in starling flocks rearrange slowly enough to permit an equilibrium description locally.

Twice a year, billions of nocturnal avian migrants traverse landscapes that are changing through natural and anthropogenic forces. Here, the authors identify light pollution as an influential predictor of bird migration stopover density across the USA.

The authors use US Breeding Bird Survey data to quantify the losses and gains in bird species richness that have not yet been realized owing to ecological time lags following past land use changes.

The exceptionally preserved skull of a starling-sized fossil bird from 80 million years ago allows reconstruction of the brain, enabling detailed endocranial description of an archaic bird that is evolutionarily intermediate between Archaeopteryx and living birds.

A new, nearly complete fossil skull of Vegavis from the James Ross Basin, Antarctic Peninsula, provides insight into its feeding ecology and exhibits morphologies that support placement among waterfowl within crown-group birds.

Ecological effects, such as disturbances, have a spatial dimension, but what influences their spatial propagation is not fully understood. Here, the authors find generalist and widespread species are key to propagating effects spatially, mediated by landscape characteristics and species provenance.

Birdsong has long connected humans to nature. Historical reconstructions using bird monitoring and song recordings collected by citizen scientists reveal that the soundscape of birdsong in North America and Europe is both quieter and less varied, mirroring declines in bird diversity and abundance.

Cumulative cultural evolution is ubiquitous in humans, but is rarely observed in non-human animals. Here, Williams et al. report elaboration of songs over several decades in Savannah sparrows, consistent with cumulative cultural evolution.

Arboviruses are climate sensitive, and their global distributions are changing. Here, the authors describe results of a One Health study programme to investigate the occurrence of Usutu and West Nile Virus in the Netherlands, a previously non-endemic area.

Clarifying migration timing and how it links with underlying drivers is essential to understanding bird migration. This study finds body mass affects the timing of both spring and autumn migration, while environmental factors mainly affect the timing of spring migration.

Garden bird feeding is a prolific human activity that provides a reliable foraging opportunity to wild birds. Here the authors use a 40-year data set to show that large-scale restructuring of garden bird communities and growth in urban bird populations can be linked to changing feeding practices.

Vertebrate species on islands may display broader feeding niches than their mainland counterparts in response to poorer diets. Here, Traveset et al. show that almost all Galápagos land birds exploit floral resources across the archipelago in an extensive generalized network.

Desert-dwelling species are adapted to high temperatures, but further warming may push them beyond their physiological limits. Here, the authors integrate biophysical models and species distributions to project physiological impacts of climate change on desert birds globally and identify potential refugia.

Interactions between European bird and plant species show that fruiting period has a major effect on seed dispersal by migrating birds, which will influence plant adaptations to climate change through latitudinal dispersal.

A dataset of the genomes of 363 species from the Bird 10,000 Genomes Project shows increased power to detect shared and lineage-specific variation, demonstrating the importance of phylogenetically diverse taxon sampling in whole-genome sequencing.

It is unclear whether bird migration patterns are restricted to interglacial periods or are maintained during glacial maxima. Somveille et al. apply a global migration simulation model to climate reconstruction to show that the prevalence of this phenomenon has likely been largely maintained up to 50,000 years ago.

The developing pelvis in birds revisits its dinosaurian state before transitioning to the characteristic avian form, providing evidence of terminal addition during evolution.

A new taxon of toothed Late Cretaceous ornithurine preserving a pterygoid is reported, overturning assumptions about the nature of the ancestral crown bird skull.

Over 20 species of geographically and phylogenetically diverse bird species produce convergent whining vocalizations towards their respective brood parasites. Model presentation and playback experiments across multiple continents suggest that these learned calls provoke an innate response even among allopatric species.

Intra-specific variations may contribute to heterogeneous responses to climate change across a species’ range. Here, the authors investigate the phenology of two bird species across their breeding ranges, and find that their sensitivity to temperature is uncoupled from exposure to climate change.

Sociality explains substantial variation in ageing across species, but less is known about this relationship within species. Here, the authors show that female dominant Seychelles warblers with helpers at the nest have higher late-life survival and lower telomere attrition and the probability of having helpers increases with age.

Medullary bone is used by modern female birds as a calcium reservoir for eggshell production. Here, O’Connor and colleagues propose criteria for identifying medullary bone in fossils and report medullary bone from a Cretaceous enantiornithine bird fossil.

A crow-sized stem bird, Falcatakely forsterae, possesses a long and deep rostrum—a beak morphology that was previously unknown among Mesozoic birds and is similar to that of some crown-group birds, such as toucans.

The sexually transmitted human parasite Trichomonas vaginalis belongs to a clade of host-switching trichomonads that parasitize mammals, birds, livestock, and pets. Here the authors describe a chromosome-scale genome for T. vaginalis and assemblies of other bird and mammal-infecting species, identifying gene functions implicated in the spillover of trichomonads from birds to humans.

This study found that millennial periods of higher rainfall combined with rising sea level enhanced sediment accumulation in Amazonian rivers valleys. This fuelled synchronous expansion of vegetation adapted to seasonally flooded substrates and its specialized bird populations, showing how global climate changes can affect specific Amazonian species.

The extant avian sternum is highly adapted to powered flight, but understanding of its early evolution is hindered by patchy fossil representation and the fact that where preserved, sterna in near-bird dinosaurs and early avialans are substantially different. To overcome this, the authors use ancestral character estimations and find that sternum evolution was episodic and experimental in relation to flight characteristics.

The transition from non-avian dinosaurs to birds capable of powered flight represents a major evolutionary transition. Here the authors analyse 48 bird genomes and identify avian-specific highly conserved elements with roles in avian limb development.

How and why individuals of the same species may differ in the way they form pair bonds is not well understood. The authors show that the individual personalities of male great tits (Parus major) regulate how quickly they meet their future partner, and the rate at which they bond with them.