Ben Sheldon

The Old Lower Light at Portland Bill - home of Portland Bird Observatory

A group of Purple Sandpipers roosting on rocks at Portland Bill, Dorset

A small group of Kittiwakes heading up channel at Portland Bill, Dorset

White-tailed Eagle

Great to be back at @portlandbirdobs.bsky.social even for a very fleeting visit this morning. Enjoyed the wintering flock of Purple Sandpipers and a steady up-channel passage of Kittiwakes before a day with swans at Abbotsbury enlivened by occasional visits from a White-tailed Eagle

This looks like an extremely useful analysis of methods to assess ageing under selective disappearance - a frequent challenge in natural populations. Nice to see the Wytham GT data featuring

A great listen - the surprising origins of this idea & its subsequent swallowing in conspiracy theory. Enjoyed learning about this in the Stalinist ghetto of East Oxford…

I freak my group out sometimes by telling them about the days of hard-copy submissions to journals and having to package up 3-4 manuscript copies and post them off to the other side of the Atlantic... But in lots of other ways it was a more streamlined system! Digital encourages overcomplication

Amen to that! Two recent submissions from my group in the works at the moment. One that is, really, minor revisions has been assigned a new MS # and presumably going out to new reviewers... The second, extensive, constructive comments which took 20pages to respond to: editorial accept in <7 days...

Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review The process of peer review is vital to contemporary science, but is also under enormous strain. This study uses mathematical models to dissect the threats to the long-term viability of peer review, su...

1. Kevin Gross and I have a new paper out today PLOS Biology.

We used economic models based around screening games and the market for unpaid labor to highlight a meltdown cycle threatening peer review.

The pushmepullyou? Though the fact I read this as a kid given how long ago it fell out of popular circulation for pretty sensible reasons does rathet date me share.google/uC8zhgtIrQPQ...

This week’s @egioxford.bsky.social seminar at 3.30 on Friday from @ruthedunn.bsky.social on the key role of seabirds in driving energy & nutrient flows. Details below:

Meta Director of AI Safety Allows AI Agent to Accidentally Delete Her Inbox Meta Superintelligence Labs’ director of alignment called it a “rookie mistake.”

not inspiring a lot of confidence www.404media.co/meta-directo...

And not forgetting Scops Owl & Rufous Turtle Dove

And two Marsh Sands!

Perfect lighthouse furniture!

Enjoyed collaborating with @lbliard.bsky.social et al on new paper using Wytham long term great tit data, particularly deploying @jsmartin.bsky.social's powerful Covariance Reaction Norm approach to investigate how stable trade-offs are across environmental gradients
academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-...

Led by my talented PhD student @justine-armg.bsky.social we’re running a #meta-analysis of #cross-sex-genetic-correlations in fitness components.

If you have unpublished data or know of studies that might not appear in a systematic search, please reach out, we’d love to include them!

Please share!

Enjoyed reading this Perspective from Tautz and colleagues which calls for a re-engagement on the part of classical genetics with the realities of complex phenotypes as revealed by quantitative genetics
academic.oup.com/genetics/adv...

Daisy also present a poster on the work which inspired this - on her birthday no less! Preprint is in the works on the responses of great tit social networks in response to experimental sex segregation.

A woman standing behind a desk at the front of a lecture hall. The slide behind her reads how does the pattern of node removal, and way network compensates, affect network metrics? In real world animal social networks

A great privilege to give my first conference talk at #NetSciX2026 in Auckland on some ongoing work with Adelaide (Daisy) Abraham on social compensation strategies when individuals are removed from real-world animal social networks.

Superb species... I was taken to see the one that wintered in the River Don back in ~2015 when visiting Aberdeen for a seminar - it wasn't quite as nice-looking as that one though!

The image contains a header at the top reading "Wanted: Shag resightings". Below this is a picture of a Shag weraing a blue colour ring with the code "UXE" and a text box of the information needed if you see a colour ringed Shag. This information is: date, location, colour of the ring, three letter code, and a photo if possible. All the information can be emailed to shags@ceh.ac.uk

Lots of reports of dead seabirds in the aftermath of recent storms. Please keep an eye out for any dead colour ringed Shags and send details to shags@ceh.ac.uk

#seabirds #ornithology #winterstorm

The Azure Tit has reappeared in Norway - after being missing for 5 weeks - just 1 km from its original location. What a bird... quite tempting!

artsobservasjoner.no/Image/3301918

You jest, but look at who has been harking back to pre-decimalisation days...

One nice result in the new great tit analysis by @davididiaquez.bsky.social et al. is a lovely illustration of Simpson's paradox: within cohorts of great tits, mass increases as birds get older, but across cohorts the population trend is in the other direction
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Are Great Tits becoming Not So-Great Tits? New preprint from @davididiaquez.bsky.social et al. documenting decline in mass of adult Great Tits in @wythamwoods.bsky.social of ~1 s.d. over 47 years - results from carry-over effect of increased population density during the nestling period. Thread ⬇️

A lovely tribute. There is a Barry Banson who provided some papers for the archive at Jesus College Oxford dating 1952-55 (so would fit the timing for Bannister). He was a Maths scholar, but also organised the Football XI.

archives.jesus.ox.ac.uk/records/JC%3...

Iconic

Living with 50 years of that conflict...

Genius idea - can't understand how I was unaware of it

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I love maps... but how did I not know about this site?! Create your own Ordnance Survey map centred wherever you wish, with choice of resolution, mapping style, even personalised cover image...

shop.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/custom-made/....

🤭

We've got Oystercatchers and Shelducks appearing around us inland which is a sure sign of spring....