2025 Field Season is in Full Swing!

For the last two months, the Project Phoebe has been hard at work collecting data for our third and final field season. At the start of the season, we thoroughly surveyed all of our nest sites from 2025 to see which nests had fallen down over the winter. Although Phoebe nests fall pretty regularly, both during the breeding season and over winter, some of our nests have been standing since before we began our work in 2023, which is pretty impressive! We’ll be using these data on whether nests have fallen to study whether nests made with certain types of materials are more stable than others–stay tuned.

Nest building started very early this year, with a community member reported sighting of a banded bird named “Echo” at Tanzanite Community Park carrying nesting material to the site of her 2024 nest on February 14th, 2025 (see photo below). As far as we know, this is nearly two weeks earlier than previously documented for Phoebes. Phoebes build their nests out of hundreds of clumps of mud and grass–the parents must make a separate trip to deliver each clump. Sounds like a lot of work! Check out the video below of a Phoebe working on her nest.

Surprisingly, we didn’t find our first eggs until 3/14/2025, nearly month later! This is about two weeks later than first eggs in 2024 (3/5/2024), but still earlier in 2023. Although we are unsure what is driving variation in egg laying times across years, all three years have had quite different climatic conditions.