ABSTRACT
Academic journals, as well as birding magazines and newsletters, often publish reports of novel and/or unusual feeding behaviors observed by professional and amateur ornithologists. These reports, termed “feeding innovations,” have been used to test predictions in ecology, evolution, cognition, and neuroscience. I present here the latest version of the avian innovation database that has been collated since the mid-1990s, in order to facilitate work by researchers that have up to now had access to smaller versions that contained only innovation frequencies. The database includes descriptions, key words, and references to 4,455 innovations collated for 1,689 species in 166 families, obtained by systematically examining the short notes section and, in some cases, entire issues of 216 ornithology publications over periods that varied between 2 and 84 years. The database is intended as a tool for researchers to further study behavioral plasticity, opportunism, and cognition in birds.