Understanding patterns of change in natural populations of animals and plants is a long-standing goal for both ecologists and evolutionary biologists, made all the more pressing by current changes in the world’s climate. My research uses long-term studies of wild animal populations to investigate these dynamics. I will present here three examples of this work. The first is a long-term study of a wild bird population in Australia, showing fine-scale impacts of warming temperatures on individual life histories and population dynamics, and also on cooperative breeding behaviour. I will then present results from two large-scale meta-analyses estimating, firstly, the contributions of climate change to temporal trends in multiple birds species, and, secondly, the potential for ongoing evolutionary adaptation in wild vertebrate populations.