Recent natural selection in a wild bird: Many studies have found evidence of rapid evolution in response to environmental change. In most cases, there has been some suggestion of which traits might be most responsive ahead of time. Bosse et al. turn this approach on its head by using genomic regions with a signature of selection to identify traits that are changing. In great tits ( Parus major ) in the United Kingdom, genomic regions showing selection invariably contained genes associated with bill growth. Indeed, U.K. birds not only have longer bills, but these longer bills are associated with increased fitness. These changes likely reflect an increase in domestic garden bird feeders over the past several decades. Science , this issue p. 365

The inheritance of patterns on avian eggshells is central to understanding the evolution of traits such as egg mimicry (e.g. in cuckoos).Yet little is known about the inheritance, or indeed function, of eggshell patterns. It has long been believed that the evolution of eggshell pattern mimicry required that patterns be determined by genes situated on the female–specific W chromosome. However, it has never been demonstrated for any bird that egg pattern traits (rather than ground colour) are female sex linked, or indeed that they are inherited. We studied the inheritance of three measures of egg–pigment patterns in a wild great tit population. Egg patterns were female specific but unrelated to female attributes such as age or condition and showed only weak environmental effects. Eggs of daughters resembled those of both their mothers and maternal grandmothers, but not of their paternal grandmothers. We conclude that this is the first demonstration of female sex–linked inheritance of avian eggshell patterning, so raising the probability that such a system operates in egg mimics and their hosts.

Summary: Persistent pesticide residues remain a significant environmental pollutant, reducing breeding success of predatory birds even where such pesticides have been banned for many years. The ability to detect such residues inexpensively without destructive sampling would be a valuable tool for ecotoxicological monitoring. We suggest that assaying eggshell colour might provide such a tool. Recent studies have revealed two mechanisms affecting eggshell pigmentation in, and believed to be specific to, passerine birds. In the great tit Parus major, reddish protoporphyrin speckles on their otherwise white eggs coincide precisely with thin shell and are related to calcium shortage. In the pied flycatcher Ficedula hypoleuca, the intensity of the eggshell's blue‐green ground‐colour (pigment biliverdin) is related to the female's health (immunocompetence) at laying. We studied the effect of the insecticide DDT (notorious for reducing eggshell thickness in raptors by blocking calcium availability to the shell gland) on the eggshell pigmentation of Eurasian sparrowhawks Accipiter nisus (Falconiformes), whose eggshells show both protoporphyrin spotting and a blue‐green biliverdin‐based ground colour. Eggshells showing protoporphyrin spots as an internalized pigment layer also showed a strong correlation between DDE levels (DDT metabolite) and shell thickness. The shells were also significantly thinner at these spots. Eggshell thickness was uncorrelated with DDE levels in eggs that lacked such spotting. The green‐ness of the ground colour, related to biliverdin pigment, also increased with DDE levels but, unlike the protoporphyrins, this increase was independent of eggshell thickness. We also noted that the colour of eggs collected before 1930 was consistent with the environmental absence of DDT. Synthesis and applications. DDT occurrence in predatory birds indicates ecosystem‐wide contamination. Correlation between eggshell colour and DDT concentration indicates that pigmentation might be used as a non‐destructive assay for DDT (which is still in widespread use, particularly for combating malaria) in eggs. Further studies should allow our findings to be applied to other raptor species. Our results corroborate the associations of protoporphyrin pigmentation with shell thinning and biliverdin with female immunocompetence described for passerines, but their occurrence in a falconiform implies that these effects evolved long before the appearance of the order Passeriformes.

At the heart of the interplay between names and knowledge is the relative salience of different taxa. Hunn (1999) described four, semi-overlapping kinds of salience: phenotypic, perceptual, cultural, and ecological. While the first three are well documented, ecological salience remains largely hypothetical in the literature. In this paper, I test Hunn's concept of ecological salience by reference to 3186 recorded English folk-names of British birds. The numbers of names recorded across 57 species represented in this study range from two (Nightingale [Luscinia megarhynchos]) to 180 (Grey Heron [Ardea cinerea]). A significant positive correlation is demonstrated between the number of recorded folk-names for a species and a measure of ubiquity in the nineteenth century. Using original bird census data collected by the author for other purposes in the 1990s in farmland and woodland in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, I demonstrate an overall correlation across Linnaean species between the number of names, number ...