Dr Steve Portugal, The University of Oxford

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).

Congratulations Robin Mehlhausen-Franks on your first PhD paper getting accepted in Ecology and Evolution. In our paper we found that the birds adopted significantly slower flight and less dense flocking behaviour when traversing over woodland, whilst flying significantly faster with a lower flap frequency over urban areas.

Our new BBSRC grant is up and running (Graham Taylor is the PI), and soon we’ll be advertising for a postdoc to start around November time, and then a 2nd to start around March. Advert details to follow. Using Homing Pigeons (primarily), we seek to unravel the visual features that birds use to guide their flight, with broad implications for cognitive science and bio-informed design.

Pleased our paper has been accepted in The Journal of Experimental Biology, all about the energetic costs of locomotion in Damaraland and Naked Mole-rats. Thanks to our collaborators in South Africa for all our mole rat work.

Welcome new PhD students Sam Thompson (starts September) and George Rabin!

Congrats first-author and former MSc student Amaia Urquia-Samele on getting your paper accepted in Journal of Ornithology. All about pigeon dominance hierarchies, and how resistent to perturbation they are. More to follow.