Dr Steve Portugal, The University of Oxford

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.

Congratulations PhD student Jamie Mayson, who submitted his PhD thesis today! Thank you co-supervisor Alex Thornton, and thank you Andrea Flack and Rudy Riesch for agreeing to act as Jamie’s examiners. Exciting papers on parakeets, geese and pigeons to follow!

Congratulations former PhD student Sam Jones on getting our paper accepted in Proc. Roy. Soc. B. Called “Habitat and competition – not physiology – determine the elevational distributions of four central American songbirds.” More to follow.

Thrilled our paper “Scratching beyond the surface: Examining macroecological patterns in avian eggshell texture” has been accepted in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Congratulations Marie Attard – and a huge amount of work by Marie to get this out.

Congratulations Lucy, Alex and Lucy on graduating with your MSc’s!

Extremely grateful to all the people that made the Shetland fieldwork possible – a very successfull trip.

This week we’re in Shetland to learn more about Gannet vision, particularly looking at the ‘black eye’ bird flu survivors and what the virus has done to their eyes. (All birds handled under license, with appropriate Institutional & Government ethical approvals).