Our fundamental understanding of diverse topics in ecology has benefitted significantly from long-term study populations that monitor individual animals over their entire lifetimes and across multiple generations. Now, the field of animal ecology is being rapidly transformed by novel technologies that provide high-resolution data on many individuals at once, allowing new insights into individuals’ interactions with one-another and how these interactions affect ecological processes. This seminar will discuss how new biomonitoring technologies have provided unique opportunities to gain new scientific insights from a long-term study population of wild Great tits (Parus major) in Wytham Woods, Oxford. The talk will focus on how long-term monitoring of this great tit population combined with in-depth knowledge of individuals’ life-histories has allowed the deployment of new research methods that are now furthering our understanding of the causes and consequences of social interactions. Specifically, this seminar will first examine the common challenges surrounding studying sociality in the wild, and how these challenges might be addressed by combining large-scale observational data with fine-scale experiments. Second, the seminar will discuss how these approaches within this wild bird population has provided broad insights into the structure and significance of ‘social networks’ for various aspects of ecology, ranging from foraging, territory structuring, breeding decisions, and the spread of information.