Red-Winged Starling Project

🌞 https://hbresearchproject.wixsite.com/hbresearchproject

This project focuses on the behaviour and body condition of red-winged starlings living in hot urban environments, where heat stress shapes daily activity, foraging decisions, and energy expenditure. By comparing weekdays and weekends, we explore the “weekend effect” - how reduced human activity alters access to food and disturbance levels - and how birds balance the competing demands of thermoregulation and foraging under extreme temperatures.

Using habituation to close human observation and behavioural training, individual starlings are encouraged to voluntarily hop onto electronic scales, allowing repeated, non-invasive measurements of body mass over time. Combined with fine-scale temperature and weather data, these measurements reveal how birds trade off food intake against heat avoidance, and how these decisions affect body condition. This approach provides rare insights into how urban birds cope with thermal stress and helps predict wildlife responses to ongoing climate warming in cities.