Well done to Ondi Crino (now at Deakin University), who today saw her paper published, focused on probably the most remote field sites that we’ve worked on to date. Ondi measured the condition of birds across these five different sites, which all faced different ecological conditions, likely due to the different rainfall that they had experienced over the couple of years prior to the sampling. Birds in the different locations were in different condition and their stress hormones reflected this. Both things were correlated with the amount of breeding activity that we found across these five populations. The study is a step towards understanding the mechanisms underlying the opportunistic breeding that is seen in so many Australian birds – where birds will only breed when the local conditions are good. The paper was published today in General and Comparative Endocrinology and can be found here.