Ibis

Editors' Choice

Highlights from the latest issue:

The April issue of Ibis contains 14 full papers and 5 Short Communications spanning an unusually wide range of ornithological interests.

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Vocal cooperation between the sexes in Little Spotted Kiwi Apteryx owenii Andrew Digby, Ben D. Bell & Paul D. Teal (Ibis 155: 229–245)

Our featured paper in this issue is a remarkable study of the call structure of Little Spotted Kiwis in New Zealand. Andrew Digby and his colleagues collected and analysed sonograms of duetting of pairs of kiwis and found that the frequencies of male and female calls do not overlap but instead the calls of one sex fill the gaps in frequencies in the calls of the other, apparently representing a hitherto unknown form of ‘vocal cooperation’ that cannot be explained by differences in body size alone. As Lauryn Benedict and Alan Krakauer point out in their accompanying Commentary article, the calls of the two sexes fit together like a lock and key, and pose some intriguing questions about how calls evolve and function among species within basal avian lineages.

• View abstract
• View commentary article

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Other papers in this issue include:

• Two papers on the structure and functional diversity of bird communities in oil palm plantations, charting the changes in both as forests are converted to oil palm
View abstract 1 | View abstract 2

• A description of the population-level impacts of a recent outbreak of trichomonosis on finch populations in Finland, showing a severe decline in the national population of Greenfinches that resulted from the spread of the disease | View abstract

• A study of the distribution of Honey Buzzard nests, which shows that the species’ nesting distribution is driven more by the distribution of its main predator, the Goshawk, than by the distribution of optimal habitat | View abstract

• The first demonstration that long-distance migrant birds breeding in North America are able to store sufficient fuel reserves to make the spring northwards migration from northern South America in a single flight | View abstract

• A comparison of the perceived and actual outcomes of songbird nests, suggesting that researchers studying nest survival may misinterpret visual signs at nests and may therefore systematically bias their estimates of nest survival | View abstract