Dr Steve Portugal, Animal Behaviour and Physiology

Third and finally, we welcome Jorge Emms-Medina, who will be working on how pigeons recognise each other.

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.