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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I just watched a young male Rose-breasted Grosbeak fly full speed into MOSE's glass facade and fall dead one of six birds that died today at this building, a death trap for campus birds In contrast Kendeda has bird-safe glass and no bird window deaths GT - let's get bird safe glass on MOSE

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Come join the bio dept at Georgia Tech - we are hiring an ecologist! tinyurl.com/GT-eco-coasts

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

3. Vulnerability to modern warming appears to be highest in high elevation species & tropical species (most likely to have range contractions, no surprise then that evidence for mountaintop extirpations comes mostly from tropical birds)

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

2. Responses to modern warming are also super variable, with: - many types of range changes (contractions the most common response, esp in ectotherms) - community level temperature tracking lagging far behind temp changes

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

we review this literature and come to three conclusions 1. Initial responses to Quaternary warming were variable with lots of lagged responses. It was only after many centuries that vegetation belts typically tracked climate even then, pollen record mostly shows resilience to warming

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

and every year we're getting more and more studies providing evidence of modern elevational range changes associated with climate change (though still some big gaps)

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

it was fun for me to learn that there is pretty decent pollen data from across the globe -- used to make inferences about plant responses to Quaternary warming

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

we think about how today's mountain species have dealt with strong temp fluctuations (~4-8 C up and down) throughout Quaternary. but soon Earth will be warmer that at any point in species' recent evolutionary histories (warmest its been for ~ 3 my)

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

I think a lot about how mountain species are responding to warming temperatures so it was great to team up with @suzetteflantua.bsky.social @kjfeeley.bsky.social Christi McCain & Jenny McGuire to write a review of sp responses to both modern AND Quaternary warming www.nature.com/articles/doi...

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Crested Caracaras eat fresh otter poop

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

cool paper alert more hummingbird species around = more niche packing, especially when flower abundance was low besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

ok, so some good and some bad but are we getting better as a field? I think this is the best news - authors are increasingly showing the data over time in pretty much all journals, even within our narrow 5 year sample!

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

second, glass half empty bc yeah... dynamite plots remain common, and dynamite plots with dots (I usually don't see the point, why not just use a dot plot? but at least they do show the data) are v common

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

here's what we found first glass half full bc optimism is more fun most figures indeed show the data - good news!

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

before I tell you the answer (some good, some bad, hold on just a minute), here's how this project got started... I was teaching Scientific Writing to a grad class last fall and we talked about figures and how dynamite plots remain common despite being bad & many people saying so

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

here's what we found first glass half full bc optimism is more fun most figures indeed show the data - good news!

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

"Look, frog and toad!" said my 4 year old when he saw the playoff game announcers Frog & Toad are his favorites, so this was a big compliment, and SVG & Ian Eagle are top notch. But which is which?

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

good q - plenty of cases with 3 or more individuals defending territories, which we interpret as family groups so we treat # of individuals as a continuous trait, though 1 individual (usually but not always male when sex could be ID'd) & 2 individuals (usually a male-female pair) were most common

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

student vs ovenbird. round 1 to the student

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

We're hiring a post doc! Looking for a global change ecologist to work with Jenny McGuire & a multidisciplinary team including me and @jameststroud.bsky.social on the ecology side of things please share widely!

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

why do males defend territories in some species while pairs or family groups defend territories in others? then-undergrad Shreyas Arashanapalli did a fantastic project to find out, analyzing 3177 playback experiments on 264 species the best predictor? latitude academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

writing can be good dynamite plots are evil Ben loves him some birds just one of many delightful end of class haikus by students in my Scientific Writing class

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

and in conclusion: Even if you have spent years saying a project is impossible, sometimes you are wrong & it is possible. And what a great feeling to figure out something you wanted to know but thought was unattainable. (plus Pac NW old growth = spectacular) the end. thanks co-authors!

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

while the Canada Jay seems to be on the escalator to extinction and has declined markedly - this is v worrisome for this species photo by Mason Maron

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

this species specific info generates a lot of cool insights like Townsend's Warblers and Varied Thrushes are getting much more common at high elevation (exemplifying the overall pattern) photos by BC bird guru Melissa Hafting (@bcbirdergirl on Instagram)

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

modeled results for all common species -- because probably everyone likes looking at abundance vs. elevation plots as much as I do (I really do)

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

and we found that species aren't really changing their ranges much. but they are becoming more abundant at higher elevations (optimum elevation shifted upslope ~125 m on average) and many species showed stable patterns (Harold with the great artwork!)

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

so what did we find? while, we knew things had gotten warmer since the early 1990s, and estimated temperature isotherms have moved ~150+ m upslope

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

so then we did the point counts. old growth Pacific NW forests are simply glorious. Will always remember standing 15' up on a mossy downed log and seeing a bobcat pad across a different mossy log just 30' to my side.

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

but usually easy to relocate survey points with very high accuracy (we think). sometimes I even found placards next to where I sited the modern point count location. Louise later told me these marked their locations, and that most (but clearly not all) had been collected at end of project

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

sometimes hard to deal with the resident megafauna

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

hard to see trash even in the old growth forest patches (keep the balloons in your hands folks)

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

easy to find the old growth stands in a matrix of secondary forests (remember the stand maps) hard to walk along decommissioned roads covered with thick alder saplings for kilometers. hard to walk along steep hillsides through blowdowns

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

And so we did it. I worked with the splendid Julian Heavyside to do bird surveys in June 2023. Here's the romantic side of fieldwork: It was a last hurrah for me, a love letter to the big trees and mountains of the Pacific NW before my family moved to Atlanta in July.

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

and the data was even already digitized! (maybe the best part?) so we chatted. Louise told me all about their sampling. She sent me their maps. We convinced ourselves this project was doable.

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

I said this for years. I even led a survey in 2021 to establish baseline data for the future. But in Jan 2023 I decided to do a big literature survey of mountain bird surveys. And on day 3 of wading through hundreds of Google Scholar tabs I found this paper and went crazy (alone, in my office)

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

I'm from Seattle, and love the Pacific NW. when I came to UBC as a postdoc in 2016, I would talk about my studies on remote Andean mountains and say "but nobody knows what is happening here in Pacific NW mountains there simply isn't good baseline data isn't that wild"

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

How are Pacific NW mountain birds responding to climate change? I got up at 4:00 am for a month to find out. but first the backstory, or "how I spent seven years telling everyone this project wasn't possible" new paper here: esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

tropical baby birds do the darnedest things check out these fuzzy weird little nestlings that hide their heads and sit there motionless. potentially trying to convince predators they are a nasty fungus rather than a tasty helpless baby bird v cool new paper: www.scielo.br/j/zool/a/MtT...

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

nice scientific writing alert -- check out the first line from this new Science paper by @gilbert-lab.bsky.social & Brent Pease "in many parts of the world, the night is no longer dark" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

cool vignette! similar things from Brazil, where Bates talks about how everyone tried to convince him that hawkmoths could change into hummingbirds and vice versa

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Benjamin Freeman @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

the one thing we did find is a latitudinal gradient in abundance change at range limits -- more southern species are getting common at BOTH range limits; more northern species are getting rare at BOTH range limits

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