Oh, to Be in England . . .

A bird called the blackcap has been showing up in Britain lately, in droves. Seems these birds of the forest, which used to winter in the western Mediterranean, have changed their migratory routes. German researchers studied some blackcaps and their offspring, and report in Nature that the change is genetic; responding to some environmental signal, the birds’ hard-wired migratory instructions have evolved in an astonishingly short 30 years.