Ned K. Johnson Young Investigator Award, 2011

Abstract

The Ned K. Johnson Young Investigator Award was created to recognize outstanding and promising ornithological research contributions made by persons early in their careers, with the hope and expectation that such individuals will provide future leadership in ornithology within and beyond North America. The AOU is proud to announce that the 2011 Ned K. Johnson Young Investigator Award goes to Dr. W. Alice Boyle, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology at the University of Western Ontario, where she has worked with Chris Guglielmo and Ryan Norris (another Ned K. Johnson Award winner, in 2006) since 2007. Boyle conducts exciting and original research on the evolution and ecology of migration in birds. In her short career, she has already made significant contributions in her field. During her Ph.D. work, Boyle sought to understand the ecological and behavioral characteristics of tropical migrant species that made them the evolutionary precursors for long-distance temperate migrants. She made great progress in this area and elegantly tested long-standing hypotheses using extensive phylogenetic comparative analyses. She then conducted a series of detailed (and arduous) field studies in Costa Rica on altitudinal migration. It was there that she tested competing hypotheses about the ecological factors that contribute to the evolution of migration between high-elevation breeding areas and lowelevation non-breeding areas. Using artificial nests, she was first able to rule out the hypothesis that high nest-predation risk at low elevation leads to migration. What she found next was even more interesting. It had long been held that because most altitudinal migrants are frugivorous or nectarivorous, their movements must track the availability of fruits and flowers. In a massive study of seasonal fruit production, Boyle found that migrants leave high-elevation sites in the rainy season despite there being greater food availability higher up than down slope. These findings led her to formulate the “limited foraging opportunity” hypothesis, which posits the novel idea that severe multiday rain events at high elevations can reduce the foraging ability of birds, such that they have lower apparent food availability and migrate to avoid these bottlenecks. This new perspective was a major The Auk 129(1):189–190, 2012  The American Ornithologists’ Union, 2012. Printed in USA.