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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Great tits [wikipedia.org] in the UK may be evolving longer beaks to better access bird feeders [nationalgeographic.com], compared to their counterparts in the Netherlands:

Setting up a bird feeder is one of the easiest ways to interact with wildlife. But could this seemingly innocent pastime be changing the very shape of our backyard birds? It's still too early to say for sure, says Lewis Spurgin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. But he and his colleagues have discovered some truly fascinating clues that a bird called the great tit may be evolving longer beaks to access bird feeders.

"We know that evolution by natural selection produces peacocks' tails and giraffes' necks and that sort of thing," says Spurgin, whose findings were published today in Science. "But it also works in much more subtle ways that are much more difficult to observe."

Also at Newsweek [newsweek.com] and Science Daily [sciencedaily.com] (reprint).

Recent natural selection causes adaptive evolution of an avian polygenic trait [sciencemag.org] (DOI: 10.1126/science.aal3298) (DX [doi.org])

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