Dr Steve Portugal, The University of Oxford

I have a new article out in Birdguides magazine, all about bird navigation and how they find their way.

2024 has been a busy and fun year. The biggest event was changing jobs, leaving Royal Holloway in September and starting a new role at the University of Oxford, which has been exciting. Congratulations to former PhD student Hana Merchant who graduated this summer and is now undertaking a postdoc in Uppsala, and to Cecylia Watrobska for passing her viva. MSc students Ellie Lucas and Matthew Lawrence also graduated this summer, and MSc students Lucy Moore, Alex Lamond and Lucy Meddings recently submitted their theses.

It’s been a good year for fieldwork, with trips around the UK measuring the visual fields of various bird species, as well as trips to Spain and France to work with bird collections there. Alex has some exciting data from her MSc which we’ll be submitting soon. It was my last year teaching the Borneo fieldcourse, which as always was exciting and packed with wildlife. Other work trips took me to Japan, Poland, France, Austria, Spain and the Outer Hebrides.

We published 11 papers this year. Particular congrats to Hana who published all four of her thesis chapters this year, and Ellie who published two papers from her MSc. Some exciting papers (hopefully) to come this year, with some nice papers in review about pheasant vision, tropical bird physiology, pigeon social structure, eggshell roughness and naked mole rat locomotion. Lots to look forward to from PhD students Robin and Jamie, as they enter the last year of their PhDs.

Congrats first author Hana Merchant on your final PhD chapter published today in Journal of Experimental Biology. Titled “Evolutionary shifts in the thermal biology of a subterranean mammal: the effect of habitat aridity”. You can read it here!

Congratulations MSc student Alex Lamond, who submitted her thesis this week!

Congrats first author Will Smith on our new paper out today in Ornithology. Thank you for inviting me to be part of the work (I did respectively very little in comparison). You can read it here! Titled “Use of anthropogenic landscapes in a wild Columba livia (Rock Dove) population”.

A fantastic visit to the bird exhibition at the Natural History Museum in Tokyo. The best bird taxidermy I think I have ever seen.

Had a wonderful visit to Kyoto, and very grateful to the University and Kana Arai for inviting me to visit and talk.

Massive congrats to Lucy Moore and Lucy Meddings, who have submitted their MSc theses!

Interested in bird vision, flight and stopping birds colliding with things, come do a PhD at Oxford. Link to advert is here!