Fledgling great tit on a bird feeder
Do you have a bird feeder in your garden? If so you may, inadvertently, be selecting for longer beak lengths in the birds that feed there, especially in great tits.
Since the 1970s, researchers across Britain and the Netherlands have been investigating a variety of characteristics in wild populations of great tits. They have found that over the last 40 years, some populations, such as those in Wytham Woods, near Oxford, have evolved longer beaks. One of the key researchers, Professor Jon Slate of the University of Sheffield, said ‘That’s a really short time period in which to see this sort of difference emerging’.
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