Dr Steve Portugal, The University of Oxford

A fun yet challenging year, with many highlights. Robin Mehlhausen-Franks and Jamie Mayson both defended their PhDs with successful vivas, and Lucy Moore, Lucy Meddings and Alex Lamond graduated from their MSc’s. Delighted to welcome PhD students George Rabin, Sam Thompson and Gayatri Kumar to the lab group, and looking forward to postdocs Paddy Lewin and Marco Klein Heerenbrink starting on their respective projects in 2026. Enjoyable trips to the ASAB Winter Meeting and BES Movement Ecology Conference, and congratulations to Robin for winning a prize at the RHUL Postgraduate Symposium. A fun fieldwork expedition to the Shetland Islands in the summer reminded how much I enjoy fieldwork (the puffins and otters helped….). New pigeon lofts fit for a king should mean happy homing pigeons in 2026, and a number of other bird arrivals due in 2026 should make it a very fun year data collection wise. Very grateful to Graham Taylor for bringing me in on two grants that started this year, with the BBSRC and DEFRA/Crown Estate. Some very odd reviews for papers this year, which at times proved challenging to contend with! But managed to clear a backlog of 9 papers that took quite some time to get through, with many of them starting the submission process in 2022-2023.

We’re looking forward to Paddy Lewin joining us in the new year as a postdoc on our BBSRC grant.

A great few days in Edinburgh for the ASAB Winter Meeting.

Congratulations Robin on passing your PhD viva with Minor Corrections. Thank you, examiners Mark Brown and Rob Heathcote.

Three new papers this week in Proc Roy Soc B, Biology Letters and Royal Society Interface. Covering bird behaviour, visual fields and eggshell surfaces. Congratulations first authors Sam, Alex and Marie.

Congratulations Sam Thompson on getting your MSc thesis accepted as a paper in Ecology and Evolution. Titled “Don’t you know that I’m toxic? Wild birds learn to avoid a novel aposematic warning signal.”

Gayatri Kumar has started her PhD with us, all about avian vision, visual attention, homing and collision avoidance!

Very happy our paper has been accepted in Biology Letters, all about Golden and Lady Amherst’s Pheasants, and how the visual fields differ between males and females.

Huge congratulations to Robin Mehlhausen-Franks, who has submitted his thesis! And thank you Rob Heathcote and Mark Brown for acting as Robin’s examiners next month. Robin’s already published one of his chapters, with two more currently in review.