In the current era of rapid and extreme climate change organisms are increasingly facing hostile environments. We argue that group-living and cooperative breeding are strategies which enable animals to adapt to poor and unpredictable environmental conditions, and thus persist where otherwise they couldn’t. This project will investigate this hypothesis in a natural avian population, determining if sociality increases in response to severe conditions, whether this increases seasonal reproductive output, and also decreases variance in that output across seasons. Finally, result from this project will tell whether sociality facilitates adaptation to extreme and unpredictable changes in the environment.