Dr Steve Portugal, The University of Oxford

Congratulations Baptiste Garde – new paper out today in Open Science about pigeon flight – you can read it here !

Having David spend a few days filming with our fish and eggshells certainly remains one of the highlights of my career. Here he is with My Flamenco, as featured in the series Natural Curiosities.

Thrilled that our paper titled “Climate variability and parent nesting strategies influence gas exchange across avian eggshells” has been accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. A huge congratulations and thank you to postdoc Marie, and thanks to the Leverhulme for funding the work.

Our new paper, very much led by Prof. Craig White, is now out in Functional Ecology. You can read it here:

https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2435.13807

Was great to be able to meet up with half the lab for a social, for the first time in 8 months. Looking forward to the social with the other half, before hopefully in June all being able to get together.

Huge congratulations to former PhD student Dan Sankey, whose paper “Absence of “selfish-herd” dynamics in bird flocks under threat” has been accepted in Current Biology. This was very much Dan’s brainchild, and we collaborated with Prof. Charlotte Hemelrijk and team. Our paper uses a robotic peregrine falcon to investigate how bird flocks respond to threat. More details to follow.

Big Congratulations to Steph and Cecylia for winning the top prizes at this years RHUL Biology Symposium. Nice one to Jack, Hana and Rosa who also gave great talks. Last week, Master’s students Amaia, Sam and Ceri delivered fantastic presentations as part of our weekly EEB series.

Congratulations PhD student Baptiste Garde (Swansea University, primary supervisor Emily Shepard) on getting your paper accepted in Royal Society Open Science, and thanks for including me in the work. All about protean movements in pigeons. More details to follow.

Congratulations and thank you to Prof. Craig White (Monash) for getting his paper accepted today in Functional Ecology, and for involving me in the work. It’s a very important piece of work, showing that geographic bias in existing data sets limits our capacity to predict organismal responses in the vast areas of the planet that are unstudied, and that this geographic bias is a much greater source of uncertainty than the difference between the current climate and the projected future climate.

As part of MSc student Sam’s project, he’s been busy putting out camera traps to see who is eating his fake caterpillars. As an aside, Sam has captured some fascinating badger footage, including this individual not enjoying having a muntjac deer close to the sett!