Dr Steve Portugal, The University of Oxford

Congratulations Robin on passing your PhD viva with Minor Corrections. Thank you, examiners Mark Brown and Rob Heathcote.

Three new papers this week in Proc Roy Soc B, Biology Letters and Royal Society Interface. Covering bird behaviour, visual fields and eggshell surfaces. Congratulations first authors Sam, Alex and Marie.

Congratulations Sam Thompson on getting your MSc thesis accepted as a paper in Ecology and Evolution. Titled “Don’t you know that I’m toxic? Wild birds learn to avoid a novel aposematic warning signal.”

Gayatri Kumar has started her PhD with us, all about avian vision, visual attention, homing and collision avoidance!

Very happy our paper has been accepted in Biology Letters, all about Golden and Lady Amherst’s Pheasants, and how the visual fields differ between males and females.

Huge congratulations to Robin Mehlhausen-Franks, who has submitted his thesis! And thank you Rob Heathcote and Mark Brown for acting as Robin’s examiners next month. Robin’s already published one of his chapters, with two more currently in review.

Congratulations PhD student Jamie Mayson, who submitted his PhD thesis today! Thank you co-supervisor Alex Thornton, and thank you Andrea Flack and Rudy Riesch for agreeing to act as Jamie’s examiners. Exciting papers on parakeets, geese and pigeons to follow!

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.