Pamela Yeh

We think that the food resources are very, very different between the cities and their natural environments up in the mountains, you know, montane, forested, meadowed areas.

And as a result of having different sources of food, we think that that is affecting the types of beaks that these juncos have.

The ones that are able to get all the human food

can end up doing really well.

And when there isn't, like during the pandemic, when suddenly everything closed and closed for a very long time, it was for two breeding seasons for us.

The types of foods that became available to the birds changed and you see a lot more of the birds eating seeds and insects.

Yes, exactly.

And so we were really shocked.

We weren't really looking for this, but we were really shocked when we were looking at the changes in beak shape and size over time.

We saw that during these years when we didn't have people, when the campus was essentially closed and classes were all online, we saw a very different set of beak traits.

Beaks were different there as well.

Yes, I think he did a lot of work on mockingbirds, actually, and found this incredible variation of...

and the form and function of a lot of these traits.

Yes, it is.

And actually, it's interesting that you talk about the Galapagos and Darwin, and you know, he has all these finches named after him, the Darwin's finches.

And they are a bunch of birds that are very closely related.

They look actually very similar, except for their beak.

There's this huge variation in beak size and shape.

And speaking about rapid evolution, the Grants, Peter and Rosemary Grant and their lab in the 70s,

continued to work on these islands and they found extremely rapid evolution based on the environment.