Dr Steve Portugal, The University of Oxford

Our Secretary Bird work was featured on The One Show on BBC1 tonight.

Busy week this week with two talks, in Manchester (MMU Evolution Research Day) and Royal Holloway (with some ATP tennis in between), before heading off to Australia at the weekend for a couple of weeks for visits with a collaborator to write a review paper, and then a conference talk at the ANZSCPB Sydney.

The final submission date for NERC DTP applications is January the 4th. Due to this earlier than expected date, the application deadline for the CASE Studentship with the RPSB has been moved to December 1st (5pm).

With Dr Alex Bond at the RSPB, we have a London NERC DTP CASE Studentship available to start September 2017 – full details below (or link below). Deadline to us is late December, date for application to NERC is early January.

Alternate view of advert can be found here – phd-advert!

I am currently working with Prof Magella Guillemette at the University of Rimouski (Quebec), finishing two papers we’ve been working on for some time, while sorting out facilities to support a forthcoming grant application. This trip was possible due to a successful application to the SEB’s “Newly Appointed Academics Travel Grant” scheme, so thank you very much SEB for your support.

Big new development of the pigeon facilities this week. Four new lofts spread over 2 sheds, which excitedly has quadrupled out capacity. Set for the start of Dan Sankey’s PhD experiments, in collaboration with Dora Biro and Emily Shepard.

Busy working at ZSL this week with Monica Daley and Emily Sparkes from the RVC, on Komodo Dragon locomotion.

I’ve got a new article out today in Journal of Experimental Biology, a Classics piece about the first big formation flight paper that was published in 1970 in Science. You can read it here!

Dan starts his PhD next week, and will be investigating how physiology and individual personality traits interact with collective behaviour in birds (more to follow). Dan is co-supervised by Dr Dora Biro (Oxford) and Dr Emily Shepard (Swansea).