Dr Steve Portugal, The University of Oxford

After numerous cancellations due to COVID, it’s been great to be in Borneo, running our Borneo Fieldcourse for the Undergraduate students.

Very happy our paper has been accepted in Ibis. All about drivers of eggshell thickness indices in bird eggshells. Congrats first author Marie Attard.

We’re looking forward to welcoming three new MSc students to the lab next month. First up, we have Ellie Lucas. Ellie is going to be studying the visual fields of tropical seabirds!

Was fun to organise a Symposium at the IOC 2022 with Samuel Temidayo Osinubi, all about the ethics of biologging with birds. Thanks to all the speakers and listeners!

Always nice to get together as a lab and have some social downtime. We ate a lot of pizza!

I recently wrote an article for The Conservation, about why people should appreciate pigeons a little more. You can read it here!

Graduation is always an exciting day. Congratulations Sam Jones and Steph McClelland on your PhD success, and Sam, Ceri and Amaia on your MSc!

Our new paper has been accepted in Behavioural Processes, all about leadership in flocks of birds (pigeons, of course). Pigeon leadership hierarchies were similar across environmental context; familiar and unfamiliar. However, we found that no covariates (e.g. dominance, personality) could predict leadership score in either context, besides body mass, with heavier individuals leading group movements more often than lighter individuals.

Been a busy few weeks for everyone in the lab. Congrats to Amaia, who passed her MSc, and to Sam, for submitting his corrections. Congratulations to Ceri also, who submitted her MSc this week. Jasper and Jamie are busy releasing pigeons, while Rana is gearing up for her first visual field measurements at The Hawk Conservancy next month. Hana and Ursh are in South Africa, working with our collaborators in Pretoria, with some mole rat madness going on.

Our new paper is out in Royal Society Open Science. Congratulations first author, and very much lead author, Marina. You can read the paper here! All about emergence of splits and collective turns in pigeon flocks under predation.