Switzerland's barn owls are turning redder — evolution, watched in fast-forward

Over 30 years, Switzerland's barn owls have quietly changed colour: more reddish-brown, more heavily spotted. University of Lausanne scientists sequenced the genomes of more than 3,000 birds and found the genes behind the shift, publishing their work in Nature Communications. Colour is not just decoration — it is tied to hunting style, fertility and coping with stress. The finding is a rare, vivid proof that evolution is not only ancient history; with three decades of patient watching, you can see natural selection at work within a single human career.