Posted by Josie Galbraith

What does it take to pull off a successful project in the urban jungle? The short answer is courage and people… pizza helps too. Last week I (along with my PhD supervisors) had a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) – Supplementary feeding restructures urban bird communities. This was a big milestone for me, but also hugely important for getting urban ecological research and the practice of bird feeding into the spotlight. Urban ecology has only relatively recently become a thing – before then it was just a clandestine notion, whispered in dark corridors and laughed at at meetings of ‘real’ ecologists. Now though, the urban environment is a place where real ecological science happens. Bold, brave, big science! It certainly takes a great deal of courage to plunge into the ocean of urban ecological research. It is awash…