Dr Steve Portugal, The University of Oxford

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.

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!