Ryeland J, Weston MA & Symonds MRE (2019) Leg length and temperature determine the use of unipedal roosting in birds. Journal of Avian Biology 2019: e02008
What’s it about? You mean you can’t work it out from the title? Ah well. We look at the idiosyncratic behaviour of standing on one leg in birds – using observations from 9 species of shorebird across a range of temperatures in the wild (well, in so far as the Western Treatment Plant for Melbourne can be considered the wild). We found that generally bird stand on one leg more when it’s colder, and that species with longer legs use the behaviour more. These suggest that standing on one leg is, in part, a heat conservation behaviour, and that it’s use is in part predicted by bird morphology
What’s the story behind it? Julia was my and Mike Weston’s former honours student who seems to have produced enough data from her honours to have almost filled an entire PhD. This is her third paper (following on from others in Functional Ecology and Wader Study). Probably not the last. She’s a gun (not literally).
The Symonds Lab 
[…] on giving. This is the fourth paper from it (after previous publications in Functional Ecology, Journal of Avian Biology, and Wader Study. You may be thinking – hold on, Journal of Applied Ecology is a pretty […]