Golden-crowned Kinglet

Here's one of Evie Hill's drawings of one of my favorite North American birds, Golden-crowned Kinglet (Regulus satrapa).  Kinglets are tiny birds with extreme amounts of activity--kind of like Evie herself.  It's not uncommon to see them in the spring in our back yard in Evanston, IL.  We also have a number of kinglets in the Birds Collection Database of The Field Museum.  To check that out You can type Regulus in the Genus space and satrapa in the Species space.  It should return 889 records.  The earliest specimens are from the 1860's.  We also have 92 Golden-crowned Kinglet tissue samples in our cryogenics facility, which is in the Collections Resource Center.  Keith Barker, a previous Field Museum resident graduate student (who worked in the Pritzker Laboratory), studied the relationships of songbirds using DNA data and has kinglets in his tree of life for these birds.  They are a bit on their own in the songbird tree of life, with no really close relatives.  You can find out additional information on kinglets.  Keith Barker is now a professor at the University of Minnesota.  Learn more about Keith and his research.