Dr Steve Portugal, The University of Oxford

A great day at the Hawk Conservancy sorting summer projects – lots of loggers and flight work to come.

Great to have our paper accepted in Ecology and Evolution, about how wild geese respond to “supermoon” events. This was data collected back in 2000, and randomly decided to look back over it. Looking at heart rate and body temperature, the geese respond quite dramatically to “supermoon” events, providing the sky is clear and not cloudy! More to follow when the paper is published.

Good Lab evening out to wave off Molly and Steph into field.

PhD students Sam, Dan, Jenny, Steph and Jack did an excellent job of presenting their work at this years RHUL symposium.

 Thrilled to have our paper accepted in PLOS Biology. Huge Congratulations to PhD Lucy Taylor on all the efforts with the work. All about costs of flocking in birds. More to follow once the paper is out.

We had a fun lab away day, including the The Battle for Britain Escape Room (trying to look serious in the photo). Unfortunately Jack and Tayla couldn’t join, so we’ll just have to have another one in the early summer.

Our new paper is out in Nature Ecology and Evolution. Very much masterminded and led by Craig White. You can read it here!

Congratulations to PhD student Jenny Cantlay who had her first PhD paper accepted today in Ibis, all about avian vision.

A fun week visiting Shaun Killen and his lab group at Glasgow University, and thoroughly enjoyed giving a Seminar there. Dan and Jack joined me to chat physiology and behaviour with Shaun and his group.

This week I am working at Slimbridge, studying duck vision. Trying to ascertain why some species drown in gill nets and others seemingly are aware of them. This forms a major part of Jenny Cantlay’s PhD (with Alex Bond and Rory Crawford).