The most recent paper from the research group has just been published in Auk (find it). This paper, by Daisy Duursma, is the first from her PhD work and describes the breeding phenology of most of Australia’s terrestrial birds from all of the available records (museum egg collections, bird nest record cards, banding records, Atlas records). As well as helping to define the high degree of opportunistic breeding in Australia’s birds, the paper shows the kind of analysis that can be achieved using these infrequently used sources of data. We show that breeding periods in Australian birds are much longer than those typically found in the northern hemisphere. A surprise finding was that birds in the deserts are actually somewhat less opportunistic than those in grassland and temperate zones within Australia.

Fig 3. from the paper (full details in the paper), please email for a PDF of the whole paper.