It's our 350th episode! And to celebrate, we've brought you a super-sized This Month in Birding, and not only because the panel of Jody Allair, Jennie Duberstein, and Martha Harbison had so much to say about truck-riding gulls, prehistoric birds, and the state of same-sex bird science. We hope you enjoy this summer-solstice sized episode. 

Links to articles mentioned in the episode:

The First GPS Observation of a Western Gull (Larus occidentalis) Riding in a Long-Haul Garbage Transfer Truck

Study Reveals Birds Nested in the Arctic During the Age of Dinosaurs

Same-sex partnerships in birds: a review of the current literature and a call for more data

Study reveals songbirds change flight patterns over Midwest's vast farmlands

You don’t have to be a birder for a long time to appreciate that birds are capable of producing an astonishing array of colors and patterns, even those beyond what our weak human eyes can discern. Hidden in that avian rainbow are clues to bird taxonomy and evolution, which is the work of our guest Whitney Tsai Nakashima, a researcher at Occidental College’s Moore Lab of Zoology.

Also, great news for one of south Texas's best birding sites. 

Break out your checklists and get ready for another summer of splits and lumps from the AOS North American Classification Committee. It’s time for our annual look at the proposed changes to the bird lists, the longest running segment on this podcast. And for every single one of those episodes, we've turned to biologist and birder Dr Nick Block of Stonehill College in Massachusetts. It's an interesting set of proposals this year, with Warbling Vireo splits, titmouse lumps, and lots of genetic mayhem. 

An interesting study discussed on the monthly This Month in Birding segment led us to Miranda Zammarelli, a PhD student at Dartmouth who has taken 50 years of hand drawn paper maps of bird territories at a New Hampshire forest, collected over many years by Dartmouth students, and brought those maps into the modern era to learn about how bird territories ebb and flow over the seasons. It's a great story of how the path of discovery winds its way from one researcher to the next. Miranda joins us to talk about her work. If you'd like to see what the maps look like,  check out this write-up about her project. 

Also, the Breeding Bird Survey and the Bird Banding Lab are set to be eliminated if a budget bill passes the US Senate, greatly threatening bird research not only in the US, but across the hemisphere. Learn more about it and what you can do. 

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